&gt; Gmail has always supported encryption in transit using TLS, and will automatically encrypt your incoming and outgoing emails if it can. We support industry-standard authentication to help combat email impersonation.<p>&gt; 1. If you receive a message from, or are about to send a message to, someone whose email service doesn’t support TLS encryption, you’ll see a broken lock icon in the message.<p>&gt; 2. If you receive a message that can’t be authenticated, you’ll see a question mark in place of the sender’s profile photo, corporate logo, or avatar.<p>AKA, it operates like the lock in my URL bar right now except in reverse. By the way Google has explained this feature, it seems fairly good to me. At least it doesn&#x27;t say &quot;this is secure&quot; because, among other vulnerabilities, the remote server admin can still read what is received (as has always been the case with email).