When should you use Logo visible in the header?
email-logo-visible · visual · required
When should you use this check?
Run this on any send where the recipient's first judgement matters — cold outreach, first-touch onboarding, anything a reader might mistake for phishing if it does not look like you. It is rendered per client and per viewport, which is the whole reason it exists: a header that works in your own inbox can fail in the client half your list uses, and a proof sent to one address cannot see that. Include it whenever you have changed a template header or moved brand assets.
When should you not?
Skip it on deliberately plain-text-styled mail, where a logo is intentionally absent — much cold outreach is written to look personal, and a missing header there is the design. It is also not the check for whether the *correct* logo variant was used against a given background or whether clear-space rules were honoured; it answers whether the mark is visibly there and recognisable. Because it is a rendered check, it costs a capture per client and viewport, so narrow the clients rather than running everything when budget is a concern.
What does it inspect?
The brand logo must be present and clearly visible in the header area of the email at all selected viewports.
What does a failure mean?
A failure means the logo was not visibly present, or not recognisable, in the client and width that was captured. That removes the half-second signal a recipient uses to decide the mail is from you and not an impersonation, which matters most on exactly the sends where trust is thinnest. Because it is per client and per width, read the finding as a statement about a slice of your audience rather than about the campaign as a whole — and note which slice, because that is what tells you the cause.
What are the Standard defaults — and why?
This check has no tunable thresholds. It is a rendered presence-and-recognisability judgement made against the captured message, with no numeric dial and no configurable list — what varies is which clients and viewports you choose to capture, and that is a job setting rather than a parameter of the check. There is consequently nothing here to calibrate to your brand.
How does an agent call it?
{
"type": "email",
"validations": [
"email-logo-visible"
]
}
Who governs the Standard?
Schemafirst.org publishes community-governed standards for digital QA. ArbiterQA is a sponsor and commercial licensee of those standards; citation does not mean Schemafirst operates ArbiterQA.
Author ArbiterQA · Reviewed by ArbiterQA · 2026-08-14