Sender Warning Issued For Millions Of Google Gmail Users

By Gordon Kelly, Forbes

Google has confirmed a bizarre new bug affecting all Gmail users, where the service issues a sender warning for every email received. Here's everything you need to know.

The bug first struck on Thursday, with Gmail attaching a security notice reserved for suspect emails to everything that arrives in a recipient's inbox. On Friday, Google subsequently confirmed that the problem had spread more widely than first believed and "affects both Gmail consumers and Enterprise customers."

The notice reads: "Do you want to continue receiving messages from this sender? [Emphasis Gmail's] Please give us feedback about this message. We won't ask you about this sender again, although you can always unsubscribe or mark it as spam in future."

In normal circumstances, Gmail only attaches this message to emails where the service has doubts about the sender, hence flagging it as a potential security risk that you may wish to move to spam. So seeing it arrive en masse attached to new emails could (quite understandably) cause concern.

In its latest update, Google reports: "Our engineering team has identified the root cause, prevented any further affected messages, and continues to work on removing the labels from the emails that have this incorrect banner."

Google states that it will provide a further update on the problem over the weekend. In the meantime, be diligent and do not blindly dismiss all notification warnings attached to your emails in case you whitelist any actual spam or phishing attempts.