Gmail Now Rejects Emails With Misleading Combinations of Unicode Characters 79
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Good that this applies to from: and not the bod (Score:4, Interesting)
I routinely substitute Cyrillic letters for Latin on Disqus and other forums to get around their filters (which block for more than mere "profanity").
Slashdot does not allow non-ASCII characters — although it does not attempt to screen out profanity either.
Why are we still blocking spam ? (Score:3, Interesting)
90% of the population would be better off with a white listed email account, i.e. if you are not on their list the email does not get through. END OF STORY.
I would seem to be more efficient to filter mail IN than to filter it out. Most people would have 20 or so people they actually want mail from.
I have mail accounts strictly for family and my local email rules enforce this
I have mail accounts for "sign up" sessions for competitions that I know are going to get spammed to hell
I have mail account for work, another for my business , etc etc all with differing contacts.
White listing would pretty much kill off spam, if there is zero chance of it getting though, what is the point. Currently spammers get through because of out dated spam lists, new tricks to get around baynesian filters, etc etc etc. White lists would negate the need.
Google, if you set up a white listed email system, my friends and family will happily sign up.