Google Labs have taken it upon themselves to better protect users of the popular webmail site, Gmail. Anything which reduces spam I'm all for, not that I get much these days. This what they say about their new protection:
We do that by looking at the "From" header, and when it says "ebay.com" for example, it means it really did come from ebay.com. Anything else is rejected; it won't even appear in your spam folder because Gmail won't accept it.
So what they're doing is to check the sender to make sure they are who they say they are before accepting the email. Any emails which are from a verified sender will have a little key next to the senders name. To start with these super-trustworthy senders are limited to just eBay and Paypal due to the intensity of which they are targeted but other high-profile targets are likely to follow shortly.
Initially I did have my doubts about this though as anyone who is a web developer will know that you can modify the "From" address in the email header to anything you want so you could actually make it look like the emails had come from ebay or Paypal. However it is not just the headers it looks at, it also uses DKIM (which uses cryptographic authentication) to further identify the sender.
If you want to give this feature a try you have to enable it via the Labs tab on the settings page.
