Gmail Verifies Emails, Adds Key Icon
Gmail's new key icon
Gmail has added a feature to help you identify “phishing” – fake emails that pretend to come from places such as your bank or eBay.
The new feature verifies the email’s source and adds a key icon to it. Currently it only highlights genuine eBay and PayPal emails but Google promise more validated emails soon. Here’s how to switch it on.
If you turn on “Authentication icon for verified senders” from the Labs tab under Settings, you’ll start to see a key icon next to verified emails that are “super-trustworthy.”
What does “super-trustworthy” mean? Brad Taylor, Gmail’s Spam Czar, says the term includes several situations:
1. when the 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.
Gmail says that because of the arduous process for senders to make their email super-trustworthy, the feature is currently limited to just eBay and PayPal. Gmail hopes to add more senders in the future, making the key icon a more widely used and recognizable symbol for verified accounts.
via The Email Wars | Gmail to Enter the Verified Accounts Game.