Here’s a blue check mark that’s really useful: Gmail has launched a new way to identify the authenticity of certain senders by displaying a blue check mark(opens in a new tab) next to their name.
The checkmark works as you can imagine: seeing it next to the sender’s name means that the sender is much more likely to be who you think it is.
However, the check mark is not available to everyone. It will only appear next to organizations that have adopted the BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) system, which Google will support in 2021(opens in a new tab). Originally, if an organization applied the BIMI security measures and validated their company images with Google, Gmail would display its logo instead of the generic avatar in Gmail. The new blue check mark appears to the right of the organization name, giving recipients an additional way to tell impersonators and real accounts apart.
It doesn’t even cost $8 a month.
Credit: Google
Additionally, if you hover over the sender’s name, you will see a pop-up message stating that the “sender of this email has verified ownership of (domain name) and the logo in the profile picture.”
This verification system can only work well if it is widely applied; so far I’ve seen the blue checkmark in emails from only a handful of brands, including Apple, Amazon, and LinkedIn. Oddly enough, the check mark doesn’t appear in many emails I receive from Google, such as reminders from Google Play and Google Calendar. Hopefully, we will see more organizations adopting (and adopting more consistently) the system in the future.
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Not only is the blue check mark a useful anti-phishing tool, it’s also a fun joke on Twitter, whose own blue check marks have gone from being a verification tool to a badge of honor that users get when they pay for the Twitter Blue subscription. . While Twitter still verifies accounts that opted into Twitter Blue, one of the problems that came with the new system was that a large number of users simply refused to pay, leading Twitter to once again give the checks away for free, though only to certain celebrity accounts .