- Code for a ‘Shielded Email’ feature is in the Google Play Services APK
- You’ll seemingly be able to use a temporary email address to avoid spam
- Doing so could also avoid your real email being leaked in a data breach
Gmail could offer the ability for users to create temporary email addresses, for signing up to online accounts or services they may be unsure about, allowing people to hide their real email address and avoid being spammed in the future (or perhaps worse dangers than that).
Android Authority got the scoop on this after digging around in the inner workings of the new 24.45.33 release of the Google Play Services APK, which contains references to ‘Shielded Email’ and a bunch of clues as to how this feature will work.
You’ll be able to create a shielded email – a temporary (Google-generated) email address different from your actual Gmail address, the mail to which gets forwarded to your Gmail inbox – when you’re forced to enter an email to sign up for an app, for example, or a website.
In these cases, with an unknown or less trustworthy firm, if you enter your real email address, you might then be spammed repeatedly by the company or website you’ve signed up with. When that inevitably happens, you can simply turn off that secondary email address – just bin it – and voila, no more spam emails.
As one of the strings of text in the hidden bits of code puts it: “To control spam, you can turn off forwarding at any time in your Google Account.”
Getting out of that bind is obviously not as simple as that if you’ve provided the company with your real email address.
Analysis: Security benefits
What’s also important to note is that this could be a real lifesaver of a security feature in some ways. By which we mean if you gave your real email address to a company that had lax security, and that outfit then suffered a data breach in which your email was compromised – that’s obviously very bad news. If you used a shielded, temporary email, and that’s leaked instead, then that’s no big deal – just bin it, as noted above, and the problem is solved.
This is a pretty cool addition for Gmail then – assuming it happens, of course. Right now, all we have is some code hanging around in the background, which might ultimately come to nothing. The good news is that Android Authority has also noticed a mention of shielded emails appearing in Google’s Autofill settings menu on Android, so that’s a positive glimmer of hope this is really happening.
And for those of you thinking – this sort of one-off or temporary email feature is nothing new, and you can get it from a variety of sources – well, yes, that’s true. However, having the functionality right there, integrated into Gmail, would be a considerable boon in terms of seamless access to temporary emails, with no fuss or messing about.