Gmail Now Rejects Emails With Misleading Combinations of Unicode Characters

An anonymous reader writes: Google today announced it is implementing a new effort to thwart spammers and scammers: the open standard known as Unicode Consortium's "Highly Restricted" specification. In short, Gmail now rejects emails from domains that use what the Unicode community has identified as potentially misleading combinations of letters. The news today follows Google's announcement last week that Gmail has gained support for accented and non-Latin characters. The company is clearly okay with international domains, as long as they aren't abused to trick its users.

Comments

FÜÇK ÿèàh

[Anonymous Coward]

...

Good that this applies to from: and not the body

[CRCulver]

...of the e-mail. Any attempt to block spam or phising on the basis of mixing character sets would have to confront the fact that some people do need to mix character sets. Typically representations of Mari in the Latin alphabet, for example, also make use of the Greek letters beta and eta. In fact, eta is used in Latin representations of several minority languages of Russia. And the Reddit crowd loves making weird smilies in their English-language writing by means of symbols drawn from Indian scripts.