Blue checkmarks used to be a sign of legitimacy, ensuring someone truly is who they say they are. While they have lost their meaning on Twitter, they’re now appearing in Gmail as a method to fight spam and phishing.
Gmail is officially adding blue checkmarks to verified senders on Gmail. Senders that have BIMI, or Brand Indicators for Message Identification — a system to ensure that brands can use their logo as a profile picture only if they’re allowed to do so — will get a blue checkmark in emails sent by them.
That way, users will be able to more easily tell apart fake emails from real ones — if you get a message from your bank, for one, you should now see a verified check in the email’s sender information.
If you’re a business owner looking to get some added protection against phishing, make sure to enroll in BIMI. You’ll need to enroll in DMARC first, too. For the rest of us, you should see this feature sometime within the next few days — we don’t see it on our end yet, but according to Google, it should begin showing up within the next 3 days.
Source: Google
