Easily Identify a Spoofed Email
What is Email Spoofing?
Email spoofing is the process of sending an email to a recipient disguised as someone other than yourself. Spoofing allows fraudsters & other hackers to target unsuspecting users into thinking they received an email from their bank when in reality, they spoofed the email header. Email header refers to the To & From fields. Since Email lacks a protocol for authentication it’s hard for most email providers to sort out spoofed messages and can only go by user reports & programming their services to identify certain traits for filtering out these messages. RELATED: Add Multiple Email Aliases to Your Gmail Account
Enable Authentication Stamp in Gmail to Identify Verified Senders
Step 1: Open Gmail. Press the Gear icon & click on Settings. Step 2: Click the Labs tab. Step 3: Search for Authentication Stamp. Next to that option, press Enable. Result: When enabled, Google displays a tiny yellow key icon next to trusted senders which are verified by Google based on the sender’s encryption methods like using 1024-bit long RSA keys & user reports over time. To reveal additional details such as mailed-by, signed-by & encryption method used, press the down arrow next to me.
Drawback
The major drawback is that there is no such indicator in the mobile apps to quickly tell whether an email is secure. To identify a spoofed email in Gmail for Android, follow these steps. Step 1: Go into the email & press View details. Step 2: Click on See security details to verify the encryption method.
Conclusion
Gmail’s Authentication icon Labs feature is a handy way to quickly identify secure messages without going through the trouble of going into the message and checking the details every time. RELATED: Backup Call Logs & Text Messages to Gmail
