If you’re a Gmail user and have been noticing less phishing and spam emails lately, you know what we’re about to say already. Google is very happy to announce that its crackdown on such mails has become more effective through years of fighting them. But the battle is far from over.
Electronic spam is classified as unsolicited mails sent to people and most of these are used to advertise products or services. Phishing is the method hackers and other fraudulent individuals or groups resort to for stealing passwords, credit card details and other personal data.
They do this by fooling users into clicking open a mail and replying to it with their important data. If you’ve ever got messages from a ‘bank’ telling you to confirm the security key and username of your online account, you know exactly what we mean. Well, Google’s cleaning up things.
In a recent blog post, the company has asked website owners who don’t send out emails to create a DMARC policy that describes their domain as a non-sender. This will prevent trouble makers from being able to impersonate the concerned site and shoot off messages to Gmail account holders.
Google has also asked portals which do send mails to set up DKIM (DomainKey Identified Email) and SPF (Sender Policy Framework). Speaking in figures, now out of 91.4% of authenticated emails sent to Gmail users, 74.7% are protected by DKIM or SPF standards. 2.25% are DKIM only and 14.4% solely use SPF.
But the most important thing from the user point of view – make sure you never open mails from strangers as well as unsolicited ads, letters from websites, special offers and so on.