Google to block email addresses with suspicious letter combinations

Gmail is popular not just for individuals, but many businesses use the client for their daily needs as well. As such Google has a great responsibility when it comes to preventing spam on its service.

Although it has pretty formidable spam filters, unsolicited email can still make way to its accounts. Adding to its spam filtering capabilities, it has now announced to block emails containing suspicious characters. It’s a welcome move, which we hope even other email providers will follow.

In a blog post , Mark Risher of Google’s Spam and Abuse Team said scammers exploit the fact that certain characters look identical to the letter o, “and by mixing and matching them, they can hoodwink unsuspecting victims.” He cited the example of “MyBank” vs. “MyBɑnk”? such confusion " Gmail would be rejecting such usage from now on.

Google will be using an open standard—the Unicode Consortium’s “Highly Restricted” designation — with an aim to strike a healthy balance between legitimate uses of these new domains and those likely to be abused.

The update comes less than a week after Google and Yahoo made i t mandatory for account holders to provide phone numbers. Yahoo has also followed Google in keeping their email systems spy-free, after Edward Snowden exposed last year the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs. Yahoo has altered its email process so users adopting encryption type messages in a separate window, preventing even Yahoo from reading the messages as they are typed, the Journal said.

Last week, Google announced it would award secure websites with higher search rankings in order to encourage web security.