Identify Legit Emails from major companies

Email spam is so common these days that it has become part of our live to wade through spam each day to identify legit emails from unsolicited ones. It can be a challenge for the average user sometimes while IT-professionals and experienced users usually do not have difficulties identifying fake and legit emails.

I bet you have asked yourself the question numerous times if an email was legit or fake. I know that I did, and whenever that happened, I analyzed the email and its header information to come to a conclusion about it.

In the end, it boils down to confirming that an email is legit, or confirming that it is not.

The software Trend Micro eMail ID aids users under certain circumstances. The eMail Id tool is a browser add-on for Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox that supports several web mailers including Yahoo Mail, Gmail and Hotmail.

Email ID can identify incoming mails from supported companies so that you can tell for certain whether an email claiming to come from a supported business is real or fake. It displays a status icon whenever it has scanned an email which tells you if an email is legit or not.

You can move the mouse over the icon to display additional information about the status of the email, including sender and sending domain information, and whether authentication and identification tests have been passed.

Trend Micro eMail ID is an easy to use security tool that does not require configuration at all. It does have some limitations though. First, it only works with Firefox and Internet Explorer and only several webmailers plus Microsoft Outlook Express 6.0. Second it supports only some US companies at the moment.

If you are from Europe for instance you will not find this tool that useful because you normally do not receive that many emails from US companies.

Update: TrendMicro has moved the web page of the Email ID browser plugin. It can now be downloaded directly from the official TrendMicro website. Please note that the program has not been updated for a long time, and that it may no longer be compatible with the web browsers or email programs or providers that you are using.

Update 2: Email Id is no longer available. There does not seem to be a comparable solution at the time of writing.

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