Google is adding a blue checkmark next to select sender’s names on Gmail to verify their identity. The feature was announced by the tech giant on Wednesday.
Companies that have adopted Gmail’s Brand Indicators for Messages Identification [BIMI] feature will have the blue checkmark appear next to their names.
According to TechCrunch, the BIMI feature requires senders to use strong authentication and verify their brand logo in order to display a brand logo as an avatar in emails.
When next you want to send an email to a BIMI-enabled user, you will see a checkmark icon appear next to the name. according to Google, this will help users to identify authentic emails from brands.
To find out if a sender is verified, simply hover the blue checkmark over the sender’s name, and a blurb that says “the sender of this email has verified” that they own the domain and logo in the profile image.
“Strong email authentication helps users and email security systems identify and stop spam, and also enables senders to leverage their brand trust,” the company wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. “This increases confidence in email sources and gives readers an immersive experience, creating a better email ecosystem for everyone.”
A couple of months ago, Google announced that its AI features will be added to a suite of its products including Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Meet Chat and Slides. The features to expect include new ways to generate, summarize, and brainstorm text with AI in Google Docs, generate full emails in Gmail based on a user’s brief bullet points, and the ability to produce AI imagery, audio, and video for presentations in Slides.
Google’s intentions with the announcement are really clear, and geared towards catching up to Microsoft and other competitors in the market. How far it can go is anyone’s guess; but it is apparent that the company is clearly in a haste to achieve its goals of catching up to its rivals.
That said, only two of the products mentioned earlier are going to have the AI writing tools integrated into them, and also made available to a group of US-based “trusted testers” this month—Docs and Gmail. However, the features will be made available to other users all over the world towards the end of the year.
