Gmail Now Rejects Emails with Suspicious Character Combinations

In the effort of making 'global email' spam free, Google on Tuesday announced that its Gmail service will now begin rejecting emails that contain misleading combinations of accented or non-Latin characters. Notably, Google had last week announced support for email addresses that contained such characters last week.

The search giant on Tuesday said that it is rolling-out some changes to ensure that spammers or scammers cannot use accented or non-Latin characters in suspicious combinations in emails, as similarities between character sets can be exploited to send misleading or harmful messages.

Google said that it is filtering emails for such domains using an open standard, the Unicode Consortium's "Highly Restricted" specification, considering it will strike a 'healthy balance between legitimate uses of these new domains and those likely to be abused.'

"To stay one step ahead of spammers, the Unicode community has identified suspicious combinations of letters that could be misleading, and Gmail will now begin rejecting email with such combinations," said Mark Risher, Spam & Abuse Team, Google.

Google last week announced support for non-Latin characters in email addresses, calling it the 'first step toward more global email'. The company is trying to make the adoption of email addresses containing accented or non-Latin characters widespread by providing partial support in its very popular Gmail service.

Google said, "The technology is there, but someone has to take the first step. Today we're ready to be that someone." The first step as per Google was allowing Gmail to recognise addresses that contain accented or non-Latin characters, and thus giving Gmail users the ability to send emails to, and receive emails from such email addresses.

Google added that it would soon bring Calendar support for email addresses with accented or non-Latin characters, and also make it possible in the future to create Gmail addresses of the same type.