Googlemail and the new anti-phishing key.

Googlemail which came out of beta last week has today announced a new anti-phishing key.

The new key is designed to give googlemail/gmail users confidence that emails they receive from financial organisations are in fact genuine rather than spam or phishing emails attempting to dupe them of their account details and ultimately cash.

The key will be shown next to the from name of the sender when Google knows that the sender is genuine. This will in turn provide confidence to end users that the email is safe to open and click on.

The key (shown below) is similar to the blue envelope used by Goodmail certified mail which Yahoo! and AOL are partnered with. Goodmail can be used by any sender who is partnered with an ESP capable of sending goodmail certified messages provided their spam complaint rates fall below the Goodmail acceptable spam complaint threshold.

New Gmail anti-phishing key.

The google scheme however will likely be free but limited to a small amount of organisations for some time until it can be rolled out to a wide range of senders effectively by Google.

The idea of the scheme is that google will display a key icon next to mail it knows is genuine. Google say the following criteria must apply for a sender to be considered for the new scheme:

• The sender must be DKIM signing their outbound email
• The organisation sending the email is a target for phishing scams
• Google must be rejecting all other email claiming to be originating from these senders.

Right now this new feature is not mainstream and instead is available from within the Googlemail Labs section of the site and is restricted to only protecting users from email claiming to be from paypal or ebay at the moment.

If you have a googlemail/gmail account and wish to turn this feature on you can do so by Turning on “Authentication icon for verified senders” from the Labs tab under Settings.

Google hope to expand this feature in the future and allow more senders to join this scheme.

To read the google blog post on this new feature click here.