By Elijah Odhiambo
Gmail has joined other digital platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest and TikTok that have verification badges by introducing blue check marks to its email service Gmail to verify the identity of some accounts.
The company said in a blog post on Wednesday that the verification badge will be displayed alongside accounts names of companies that have adopted the Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) feature that was introduced in 2021.
BIMI requires senders to use strong authentication and verify their brand logo in order to display a brand logo as an avatar in email.
“Users will now see a checkmark icon for senders that have adopted BIMI. This will help users identify messages from legitimate senders versus impersonators,” Google said.
Similar to that Twitter’s blue check mark, Google has also introduced a blue check mark verification feature on its Gmail (Google Workspace) platform for interested admins.
With the new update on Gmail, users will now start to see blue check marks at the right of the sender’s name who has verified their account and brand logo with BIMI. Google has also shared an image representation of how it will look which is given below for reference.
This new feature will help Gmail users to identify genuine senders and prevent them from falling into the traps of imposters and other spam senders. On hovering over the blue check mark, Gmail or Workspace users (including legacy G Suite users) will also find the message stating that the sender’s email and the logo used in the profile picture have been verified and the sender is a legitimate or genuine sender.
Interested admins can verify their Google accounts by adopting DMARC and then getting a Verified Mark Certificate (VMC) from authorities like Entrust or DigiCert in order to get the blue check mark. Currently, there is no end-user setting for this feature.
Google started rolling out the new update to its Gmail or Google Workspace platform from the 3rd of May, 2023, and is to complete its full rollout within three days.
Gmail joins other digital platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest and TikTok that have verification badges.
LinkedIn also recently introduced theirs, while Facebook and Twitter have even gone further in recent days to monetize the badges by making users pay to get them.
