Google, Yahoo and Microsoft team up to ditch the phish

The giants of the webmail world are joining forces to put an end to phishing emails, with Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL all on board with the plan.

The email supergroup is backing the catchily-named Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance specification (DMARC) which will reduce spammy emails by way of a new authentication system.

The new system will see email senders, generally brands and marketers, authenticating emails across the board, rather than on a service-by-service basis – it's a kind of legitimate email demarcation, if you will (see what we did there).

Shooting phish

Once an email is labelled a-okay by the DMARC policy, it should make its way into Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, Facebook email and other inboxes without making a detour to the junk email folder, acting as a kind of virtual hologram of authenticity.

"DMARC is a proposed standard that allows email senders and receivers to cooperate in sharing information about the email they send to each other. This information helps senders improve the mail authentication infrastructure so that all their mail can be authenticated," explains the DMARC website.

Also playing ball are Facebook, LinkedIn and PayPal, and while end users like you shouldn't need to adjust any settings, email senders, ISPs and webmail providers will likely need to work together to make adjustments.

As well as filtering out the bad email eggs, DMARC will make it easier for legitimate domain owners to have phishing emails blocked outright – hopefully putting an end to requests to update our security settings supposedly sent from banks we don't even bank with.

If email policy is your thing and you want to find out more, hop on over to the DMARC website for all the granular spam detection policy information you could ever desire.

From Wall Street Journal via The Verge