Gmail is suddenly changing.NurPhoto via Getty ImagesFor the 3 billion users of Google’s world-leading email platform, there is a major change coming and it’s one update you really need. As spam and malware continue to plague the platform — and the new threat of AI attacks takes shape, it’s clear new approaches are needed to take back some control from a user perspective.
As I reported last year, one such upgrade is an email address masking solution that mimics Apple’s Hide My Email, whereby you can stop giving up your real address to every website and service that requests it, which is how it finds its way onto countless data broker lists and drives the spam that comes back around to haunt you.
This means you will be able to create new email addresses when asked for contact details, and these will be given to those sites. Those emails will then redirect to your normal inbox, but you will be able to turn them off when they have been given away to marketeers, stemming the tide of spam — or worse — coming into your account. You should be able to reply from the masked address.
As reported by Android Authority this week, “work is clearly coming along nicely on the new option. When it becomes functional, and based on the strings we’ve previously discovered, it should technically offer to generate a new single-use or limited-use email address for that app or website in an Apple Hide My Email-like fashion. Any email you receive at that new address will be auto-forwarded to your main address, which is kept private, and you can stop forwarding at any point to avoid any bad spam.”
Playing with beta code, the website’s team found that Shielded Emails will form part of Google’s Autofill. When it opens as it detects an email address request box, you will be given the new option. Playing with the setting doesn’t yet offer any new email addresses yet, as “Google probably needs to enable the alias-creation system server-side.”
As I’ve suggested elsewhere, email needs disrupting. The platforms are not changing to reflect how we have changed out communications behaviors and to reflect best practice in other platforms — especially messaging. This is why Elon Musk is able to tease something like Xmail so effectively. This isn’t that kind of change, but it helps.
Google’s Gmail updateAndroid AuthorityMeantime, it will be good to see further upgrades this year, which ideally will include on-device AI-powered spam and threat screening that doesn’t rely on server-side security at all times. This would better reflect advances elsewhere.
On that note, Google’s March 4th announcement that it is launching “two new industry-leading AI-powered scam detection features for calls and text messages, designed to protect users from increasingly complex and damaging scams,” is the kind of innovation needed on the email front as well. The medium remains ripe for disruption.
While “the majority of scams now delivered through phone calls and text messages,” the volume of email phishing is only getting worse, and is now enhanced by AI. Google’s new features are designed to leverage Android’s on-device AI processing, but where a device is capable, the same more effective monitoring should be made available for email clients as well. We should move away from server side only.
Google says the new offerings “specifically target conversational scams, which can often appear initially harmless before evolving into harmful situations," which lends itself more to messaging than a one-time email approach. But the privacy preserving, real-time architectural principles can be applied to email as well.
Google says that “traditional spam protections are focused on protecting users before the conversation starts, and are less effective against these latest tactics from scammers that turn dangerous mid-conversation and use social engineering techniques.”
And that’s exactly the point.
The question for Gmail users will be whether their current email addresses are so compromised after years in service that it’s time for a wholesale change. A new account and email address, redirecting email from the old account for now, would allow full advantage to be taken of this new capability. It’s a major change, but for those struggling under the weight of unsolicited traffic it might be the only way.
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