Gmail Stops Phishing: The Authentication Icon For Verified Senders
In the attempt to limit and stop phishing and spam practices, Gmail Labs has launched a new experiment: Authentication icon for verified senders. When it is turned on, a key icon will appear next to verified emails that are “super-trustworthy”. Currently, this features is enabled only for eBay and PayPal, but more senders could be added in the near future.
According to the announcement made last week on Official Gmail Blog, “Now any email that claims to come from “paypal.com” or “ebay.com” (and their international versions) is authenticated by Gmail and — here comes the important part — rejected if it fails to verify as actually coming from PayPal or eBay. That’s right: you won’t even see the phishing message in your spam folder. Gmail just won’t accept it at all. Conversely, if you get an message in Gmail where the “From” says “@paypal.com” or “@ebay.com,” then you’ll know it actually came from PayPal or eBay.”
Gmail rejects the messages which represent phishing attempts based on DomainKeys and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), used to verify senders and help identify forged messages.
The term “super-trustworthy” attributed to the legal email messages has the following signification: “(1) the sender, usually a financial institution, is a target of phishers, (2) all of the sender’s email is authenticated with DKIM, and (3) Gmail rejects any fake messages that claim to come from this sender, but actually don’t. “
In conclusion, by turning on Authentication icon for verified senders experiment, you will have less spam and phishing email messages in your Gmail account.
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