With the recent cyber-attacks in the recent months coming into lime-light, Google decided to add an anti-phishing feature in Gmail that automatically display’s the sender’s address for some messages.

The base behind this lies in the fact that – when an email-id is created a user can choose to adopt a display name as per the choice. The display name can be chosen in such a way that it entices other users to respond to your mail without verifying the credentials. For example, suppose there is a mail id xyz@abc.com but you chose to display your name as of suppose some reputed bank say STATE Bank of India. So when you send a mail with xyz@abc.com the receiver will see in the inbox a mail received from STATE Bank of India instead of the mail address. And this can make people to respond to the mail without actually doing verification.

Gmail users can see the sender’s email address on all messages from people the recipient had either not sent mail to or were not in the contact list on the message header. The sending address of a third party firm such as email marketing bulk mailers who send messages for their retailers will also be automatically displayed.

Before the feature was added, Gmail users had to manually click on a “show details” link in the email service’s interface to see the sender’s address. But the new feature is designed to help users easily spot suspicious messages that try to hoax the users into divulging their Gmail login access or other personal information.

See the difference

With Old Interface:

With New Interface:

Gmail may attract more users with its strengthened anti-phishing feature unless other web mail services starts providing this feature.