Are You Being Phished?

Ever got one of those emails asking you for your credit card details? Most likely it’s a phishing scam. Usually, the emails look pretty legitimate, and it can really be confusing to figure out the real emails from the scammers.

Well, worry no more. The Gmail team knows how hard it is to figure out the real deal from the scum, and they have created ways to protect us from those evil doing scammers.

Last year, the Gmail team introduced a way to make sure that scammers do not get through to your inbox. 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. It’s email the way it should be.

eBay and PayPal have worked hard to ensure that all their email is signed with DomainKeys and DKIM. Armed with this information, Gmail can easily reject as a fake anything that doesn’t authenticate.

You may not be aware of this extra protection. So the Gmail team has come up with extra ways to protect you and your email account from phishers; even though they already filter out the phishing scams, there might be a rogue one passing through the filters, right?

Fortunately, the Gmail team has been able to make another precautionary layer so you’d know if the email is legit or not.

When you turn on this exciting new Gmail labs feature, you’d be able to see a key next to the sender in your email, and you’d be able to tell if the sender is “super-trustworthy.”

To be super-trustworthy, (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.

To turn on the feature, go to Settings, click on the Labs tab, and then activate “Authentication icon for verified senders.”

Sounds good? Tell me what you think ok?