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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Google announced back in February 2016 that it planned to improve Gmail security by adding new security indicators to the service.
One of the improvements was the introduction of a new red question mark icon in place of the profile photo, avatar or blank icon to highlight unauthenticated emails.
Google announced yesterday that the roll out of the feature started, and that Gmail users on the web and on Android will soon notice the new red question mark icon for unauthenticated messages.
[...]
Google's method for determining the authenticity of a message is the following one: if a message can't be authenticated using DKIM or Sender Policy Framework (SPF), it is marked as unauthenticated.
Gmail, on the web, displays profile icons only when an email is selected, but not in the email listing itself. This means that you will have to click on a message to find out if it is authenticated or not.
Source: http://www.ghacks.net/2016/08/11/gmail-question-marks-unauthenticated-senders/
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 12 2016, @11:12PM
Profile photos for email?
Slowly it's happening. Email is becoming a federated social media platform of big providers who trust each others authenticated senders.
I stopped using email about the same time social media became popular. I'm not going back. If that means I'm not welcome to communicate with people, well then, fuck people to hell.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 12 2016, @11:50PM
Google has profile photos because Gmail has been integrated with Google Talk and/or Google Plus.
Many smaller webmail providers have no social media features and probably never will. And if they did add them, what are they going to do, delete your account for not having a profile photo? Problem solved!
Your stance on email is paranoid.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 13 2016, @04:00PM
I concur -- and I prefer email for the reasons you stated.
Why someone would be upset about email having a photo, a photo introduced via its own topology and not shared between email providers -- is not much of a problem -- especially when the proposed solution was to stop using email and utilize social media instead? How is that better or safer?
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Friday August 12 2016, @11:53PM
Gmail automatically ties email addresses to G+ profiles and loads them on the fly. It can also show pictures from your address book.
Still always moving
(Score: 5, Interesting) by edIII on Saturday August 13 2016, @12:11AM
Calm down. Nothing of the sort has happened, and we in fact have reason to celebrate. Everyone wins here, even the little guys.
DKIM is a bit of a pain to set up, but is cryptographically secured. SPF is much easier to set up [mailradar.com], but is not secured as well. Both however use TXT records in DNS, which means that long TTLs and DNS security will help you. That also means that Google is actually and finally evaluating the damned things I've been sending them for years now. If somebody spoofs a message from my server, gmail will now put an error icon next to the email.
*applause* *applause**applause* *applause**applause* *applause**applause* *applause**applause* *applause**applause* *applause**applause* *applause*
None of this is outside of the hands of somebody that administers their own email servers. I've been running Zimbra ZCS servers for a few years now, and setting up SPF or DKIM is fairly simple [zimbra.com]. SPF is so simple, the whole thing is platform agnostic. Just use the tool from above and create a new txt record for your primary domain found in the HELO/EHLO statement on your server.
Tl;Dr - Nothing bad happened. Google started to implement email authentication technologies that are both over 10 years old, and widely deployed despite the fact the most email administrators knew the big guys weren't really using it. Now Google is prominently using it. Email administrators rejoice :)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.