Yahoo Mail to block fake eBay and PayPal e-mail

If you use Yahoo Mail you should be seeing a significant reduction in the number of e-mail scams purporting to be from eBay and PayPal very soon.

Yahoo will be upgrading its system beginning on Thursday with technology--dubbed "DomainKeys"--designed to block phishing spam and other fraudulent e-mails that look like they come from eBay and PayPal but don't. The system works by verifying the domain of the sender of the e-mail, allowing ISPs to block messages they deem illegitimate.

The upgrade is expected to be accomplished globally over the next several weeks.

Typically, the phishing scams masquerade as e-mails from trusted financial sources and direct a recipient to a Web site where they're asked to enter their user name and password. From there, their information is stolen.

Although most companies warn their customers that they won't send unsolicited e-mails asking for usernames and passwords, many people are still fooled. Blocking the scam e-mails before they hit in-boxes should cut down on the problem. Now, when is Yahoo going to do this for the major banks?

[coryschulz]

Gmail has been doing this for a while now

Gmail is amazing. Enough said.

[co_z]

yahoo invented domainkeys

and implemented it for its mail service in 2004. How is this news?

[terminalblue]

hey...

you beat me to the punch...<br />you would think that cnet's research team might be a little aggressive before they run with a story

[terminalblue]

yahoo has been using domain keys

whenever you open a mail there is a line that say that the sender is valid using domain keys. They have not been blocking email, but they have been notifying user about scam emails for more then a year. i would prefer to see an email that they claim is spam, or at least have the option to turn it off(domain keys).

[rainingcats]

they werent blocking

rightly said domainkeys was on yahoo for quite some time and it's not news, but the fact that they'll be blocking mail now is bad news. <br /><br />you'll know what that means if u had to send newsletters to yahoo users and see the mail-queue choke with rejects from yahoo. And yahoo support for these problems is literally robotic (idiotically robotic).<br /><br />i'm headed for troubled times if yahoo blocks email for domainkeys as exim (a very popular Mail Transfer Agent) has only experimental support for domainkeys. hope that's restricted to these too domains.

[ejevo]

What took them so long?

This should have been implemented years ago.

[flickrz]

Is the ebay Starting to conform?

I m not sure how to read this but domainkeys were invented by <br />yahoo and has been using it for years. Now, it seems that EBay <br />is also implementing the same. Perhaps that would mean some <br />kind of collaboration between the two.<br />It doesnt affect me anyways; i hardly get any spam on my 5 year <br />old address.

[security_gal]

Agreed...

Yeah, you would think this would have been implemented years ago. Today I saw that Blue Coat has this new anti-phishing product that will catch phishing on the fly. I think this is more geared for businesses, but it?s great to see new initiatives targeting this problem!