Yahoo! has announced it is joining forces with eBay and PayPal to protect consumers against email fraud and phishing scams.The collaborative effort will mean eBay and PayPal customers who use Yahoo! Mail will receive fewer fake emails claiming to be sent from the companies.
In a statement, the search engine declared: "Yahoo! Mail is the first web mail service to block these types of malicious messages for eBay and PayPal through the use of DomainKeys email authentication technology."
DomainKeys technology allows internet service providers to determine if messages are real and should be sent to a user's inbox.
The technology upgrade is due to be rolled out across the world over the next four weeks to all users of Yahoo! Mail.
Michael Barrett, chief information security officer at PayPal, stated: "While there is clearly no silver bullet for solving the problems of phishing and identity theft, today's announcement is great news for our customers who rely on Yahoo! Mail."
Chief information security officer at eBay Dave Cullinane added that, through industry cooperation, firms can collectively attempt to "stamp out" phishing and other kinds of email scams.
Yahoo!'s announcement comes in the wake of uSwitch research that suggested homes in the UK receive almost 82 million spam emails each day, equating to 947 every second.
According to the figures, Britain now ranks fourth in the world for spam attacks.
