Over the past few years, Google has always improved the security of its services, to try to ensure maximum reliability and protection of Google accounts and above all of Gmail, increasingly important for millions of people and today clearly the safest email service. . Google offers many tools to secure the Google account, above all it invites users to activate the Gmail login with double verification, very important to prevent any attempt to intrude the account.
In addition to two-factor authentication and HTTPS connection, Google has added new tools and features for Gmail that guarantee the safety of users and their privacy, preventing not only unauthorized access by cyber criminals, but also by intelligence agencies and governments that want to hack an email account.
To recompile what Google has done to make Gmail secure we know that:
1) Gmail shows warnings in case the state wants to enter our account to read the messages
This is something related above all to some countries where the government and espionage agencies are very intrusive (as in the USA).
Google has the ability to identify government hackers by informing Gmail users so they can act accordingly promptly.
This is just the latest of the security measures that Google, to date, has added to Gmail, as explained to us in a post of March 24, 2016 on the official blog.
Obviously it is rather rare to see such a message appear, but it is always reassuring to know that it is there.
2) SMTP Strict Transport Security Protocol (SMTP STS)
This is a technical implementation that Gmail users cannot notice, a new security feature called "SMTP STS" which derives from the joint effort by technicians from companies such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Comcast, LinkedIn and others.
SMTP STS was designed to improve email security by preventing Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks and encryption downgrade attacks.
In practical terms it serves to make the transmission of messages more secure, possibly blocking the sending of emails if a problem is detected on the encryption certificate.
3) End-to-end encryption
End to end encryption is the protection by which a sent message is encrypted from the moment it is sent until it is received.
The encryption takes place on the sender and recipient's computers, passing completely indecipherable on Google's servers.
As end-to-end encryption software is needed, Google is working on an open source Chrome extension, for now only in the testing phase, called Google End-to-end, not yet available.
Available instead is the (non Google) Mailvelope extension, which uses the same OpenPGP (Pretty Good Privacy) encryption standard.
The browser extension allows users to create their private and public encryption keys in their browser; the public key is then uploaded to Google's servers, while the private key remains stored in the browser.
When a user sends an email to the other user with a PGP key, the browser automatically downloads the other user's public key from the server to decrypt the contents of the email.
4) Red padlock
Previously, there was no method to ensure that the e-mails received were passed through an encrypted channel, that is, not interceptable from the outside.
We are not talking here about end-to-end encryption, but about the standard encryption that ensures that emails are private.
In general, all the most popular e-mail and messaging services make messages sent as private, except for some that have not implemented a secure system.
To find out if an Email account is secure with Gmail just note that a red padlock does not appear next to the sender and recipient names, indicating that the person you are writing to or who has written to us uses a service mail without encryption.
It is surprising to note that many of the Italian mail providers such as Tiscali, Virgilio and Fastwebnet are absolutely unsafe.
5) Malware check
Already a year ago Google had added the reporting of dangerous sites in Chrome.
Now, just for a week from the date of this article, such protection is also active in Gmail where, in case you receive an email with links that lead to sites with viruses or spam, then you will see a message warning, inviting the user to be careful and not continue browsing.
This automatic protection, which makes Gmail more secure than all other mail services, works in all browsers and on all computers and cell phones.
6) Chrome extension to protect Gmail password
If you use Chrome, as seen in another article, you can install a specific extension designed by Google that protects the account from unauthorized password changes and that, in fact, gives an additional security measure against theft of account.
READ ALSO: Retrieve a Google and Gmail account and solve access problems
