Quickest Way to Identify Spoofed Emails

Email spoofing is still the most widely used method to used by online scammers & malicious organisations for stealing sensitive information like personal details, credit card information & other identification. Google does an excellent job of blocking such emails but it’s still a challenge to block new spoofing services & methods quickly. So here’s a trick to identify spoofed emails received in Gmail by enabling an option called authentication stamp.

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.

Enable Authentication Stamp in Gmail to Identify Verified Senders

Step 1: Open Gmail. Press the Gear icon & click on Settings.

Press the gear icon & select Settings

Step 2: Click the Labs tab.

Select the Labs tab

Step 3: Search for Authentication Stamp. Next to that option, press Enable.

Search & enable the Authentication icon feature

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.

The yellow key signifies a properly signed message

To reveal additional details such as mailed-by, signed-by & encryption method used, press the down arrow next to me.

Press the down arrow to see the Email header with additional details

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.

From left to right: Press view more details & select See security details

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.

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