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Domains & Authentication

How do I send with an avatar?

Show your logo or photo as an avatar in recipients' inboxes. Per-provider profile pictures only cover that provider; BIMI and Apple Branded Mail let your logo show across an entire domain.

An avatar — your logo or a photo shown next to your name in the inbox — is a small thing that does real work. Industry studies have linked a recognizable sender logo to higher brand recall, better open rates, stronger purchase intent, and more confidence in the email. The catch is that there's no single switch: almost every mailbox provider has its own way of attaching a picture to an address.

There are two broad approaches. You can set a profile picture per provider (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, Apple Mail), which only affects mail seen in that provider and only for the exact address you set it on. Or you can authenticate your logo at the domain level with BIMI or Apple Branded Mail, which lets your logo show for any address on the domain across many providers.

Gmail

  1. Go to your Google Account settings.
  2. Upload a profile picture.

Avatars in Gmail display in the mobile app (including in push notifications) and inside opened emails on desktop.

Outlook

  1. Go to your Outlook profile settings.
  2. Upload a profile picture.

Avatars in Outlook display in the mobile app and inside opened emails on desktop.

Yahoo

  1. Go to your Yahoo account settings.
  2. Upload a profile picture.

Avatars in Yahoo display in the mobile app and inside an opened email on desktop.

Apple Mail

Apple Mail only shows an avatar if the recipient has added an image to their contact card for you. For a logo that shows without the recipient doing anything, set up Apple Branded Mail — a proprietary Apple format introduced with iOS 18.2 that displays your logo as an avatar in Apple Mail — or set up BIMI with a Verified Mark Certificate.

Using Gravatar

Some clients (e.g. Thunderbird, Airmail, Postbox) display an image from Gravatar. Create a free Gravatar account, add your avatar, and verify the addresses you send from to that account so your image is displayed in those clients.

Limitations

Because each provider stores its own profile picture, the per-provider approach has two hard limits:

  1. You can only add an avatar to a real inbox, limiting it to that one provider.
  2. You can only show it on mail sent from the same address you set the avatar on.
The way around both limits is [BIMI](/docs/domains/bimi) (Brand Indicators for Message Identification). BIMI is supported by nearly all major providers and lets you send from any address on a domain while showing the same logo. It builds directly on your authentication — you need a p=quarantine or p=reject DMARC policy first. See Set up BIMI for the full walkthrough.