Yahoo News: Tech companies team up to combat email scams

[turetzsr]

...By Barbara Ortutay | Associated Press

...Link to full article: http://news.yahoo.com/tech-companies-team-...-161502894.html.

...Excerpts:

NEW YORK (AP) - Google, Facebook and other big tech companies are jointly designing a system for combating email scams known as phishing.

<snip>

To combat [phishing], 15 major technology and financial companies have formed an organization to design a system for authenticating emails from legitimate senders and weeding out fakes. The new system is called DMARC - short for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance.

DMARC builds upon existing techniques used to combat spam. Those techniques are designed to verify that an email actually came from the sender in question. The problem is there are multiple approaches for doing that and no standard way of dealing with emails believed to be fake.

<snip>

...Well, perhaps a step in the right direction but seems like only a very small and just barely useful step!

[rconner]

"Congratulations all around, gentlemen, we've invented a new acronym!"

-- rick

[Farelf]

Yes, which we REALLY need. But, better than most - DMARC like "demarcation", a line drawn (as in the sand) - I like it, or I will if it achieves something.

As I have been skiting about for a couple of years, my ISP actually blocks misdirected bounces to its customer accounts. Not quite the same thing but verification that I never sent the message supposedly being bounced so simply drop it. Oooh, that makes some real difference to the e-mail experience. Presumably this is one of the capabilities that can be generally instituted in parallel with the (much more difficult) anti-phishing initiative, while they're thinking along those lines.