Unfortunately, this is the sort of a change that&#x27;s a red herring for any actual improvements to email security.<p>The use of unencrypted or encrypted link to the receiving email provider&#x27;s MX server doesn&#x27;t change all that much in terms of who can read the email: it&#x27;s still sitting in plaintext on the recipient&#x27;s server (as well as the sender&#x27;s server), and the group of actors who can sniff traffic on the backbone like that is probably just as easily able to get it from the servers.<p>The authentication feature is even worse. The problem of spam and phishing isn&#x27;t that email claims to be from important-service@bigbank.com, it&#x27;s that email claims to be from &quot;Big Bank&quot; &lt;whoisthis@some.really.shady.ru&gt;. It&#x27;s been noted before that spammers tend to be the most aggressive at uptaking new &quot;anti-spam&quot; technologies like SPF and DKIM, and this sort of validation feature seems like a prime vehicle for exploitation by spammers.