Summary
The simple site, gail.com, isn’t a site you’d expect to get over 100,000 visitors each week. However, there’s a reason why this site gets so many visitors. The reason why this site is so popular also teaches us an important lesson about online safety.
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The website gail.com currently averages over 110,000 visitors and over 1.2 million emails every week. But this text-only site isn’t the type of webpage that you’d think would attract these stats. Here’s the reason why gail.com is so popular and the security lesson that it teaches.
For Personal Tech Media, this is Two Minute Tech. I’m Jim Herman.
In case you hadn’t noticed, if you omit the first “M” in gmail.com, you’ll get gail.com. Most of the visitors to this site seem to be people looking to check their Gmail account. Fortunately, the owners of gail.com have a strong interest in protecting privacy. The site has no trackers or advertising except for one ad for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
But registering common misspellings of popular domains is a common tactic of cybercriminals. If you thought you typed gmail.com, you wouldn’t be surprised if you saw the Gmail login form. But imagine you accidentally typed gail.com and the owners of that domain wanted to steal your Gmail login. When shown a Gmail login form, you’d probably enter the information without giving it a second thought.
Because of this problem, many large companies purchase domains that are similar to their own. For example, if you leave the “E” off of Facebook.com, you’ll still end up at Facebook’s website.
So let the popularity of gail.com be a reminder to you. Be careful when typing an address, both in your browser’s address bar and when sending an email. Before you press enter or hit send, give that address a second look to make sure that it’s correct.