Billing

Yahoo!, eBay (News - Alert) and PayPal recently announced a collaborative effort to protect customers against fraudulent e-mails and the dangerous scams known as phishing attacks. The customers who use either PayPal or eBay and use Yahoo mail IDs for this purpose will now get fewer fake mails claiming to have come from eBay or PayPal.

Customers of PayPal and eBay will be aware of the fraudulent mails asking the users to give away their user names and passwords in the pretext of authenticating their accounts. The fake emails will look strikingly similar to the genuine Web site and generally use fear of termination of account to overshadow the logical thinking of the user. Yahoo! Inc was the first email provider to block fake emails for these two companies thereby reducing the risk faced by a customer.

John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo! Mail, said in a press release, “By reducing the risk of phishing scams, Yahoo! Mail now offers a much safer Web mail service for eBay and PayPal users, and this protection will benefit the larger Yahoo! Mail community as well. We look forward to helping to facilitate continued industry adoption of DomainKeys and the proposed standard DomainKeys Identified Mail, as we continue to increase our efforts to safeguard the inbox.”

DomainKeys technology allows the Internet service providers to determine if messages are real and should be delivered to a customer's inbox. Since Yahoo!, eBay and Paypal are collaborating in this effort, they can use the DomainKeys technology to the fullest and block the unwanted phishing attacks to the users. While this may not be a foolproof method to protect the customers, the users of eBay and Paypal can now rely on Yahoo mail more than any other email service.

The technology upgrade will be rolled out globally over the next several weeks to all users of Yahoo! Mail. All three companies are now in the process of transitioning their systems from DomainKeys to the proposed standard DomainKeys Identified Mail. The companies expect to roll out the service in the coming months.

--------

Raju Shanbhag is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.