Google, on the occasion of Safer Internet Day, announced on Tuesday that it is adding new security precautions to make email safer for you. The new authentication features will help you differentiate between safe and potentially harmful mail.
Gmail has always supported encryption in transit using TLS, and will automatically encrypt your incoming and outgoing emails if it can. Google also has other background security measures running to keep your email safe. But all this doesn’t matter much when it comes to mail from other email services. When you send or receive mail to or from another provider, you can’t always be sure that the data present in the email is safe.
To counter this issue, Gmail will now notify you when you receive a message from, or are about to send a message to, someone whose email service doesn’t support TLS encryption. The security alert comes in the form of a broken lock. This feature was, in fact, announced by the web giant last year and this year, it is finally going live on Gmail.
Not just this, Google has now added another security feature in Gmail which will help you identify whether or not a sender is authenticated. In case you receive an email from someone who cannot be authenticated, you’ll see a question mark in place of the sender’s profile photo, corporate logo or avatar. G
Google notes that not all marked mail will be dangerous but the company believes that this new feature will help user be extra cautious about replying to or taking action inside such mail.
And the good news doesn’t end there. Google also announced that if you complete a two-minute account check-up on the occasion Safer Internet Day, you’ll get 2 GB of free extra storage on your Google Drive.
To avail this offer, head right here.
