Dig if you will this picture: You’re taking a leisurely walk around your neighborhood park on a sunny day, taking in the sun, the scenery, and the sanctity of the place you’ve come to call home. Suddenly, a masked intruder appears out of nowhere and tries to rob you. That would be a jolting and revolting experience, wouldn’t it?
To me, the online equivalent of such a criminal encounter is finding a phishing email in my mailbox. I deem my mailbox as the safe haven of my online experience. It’s where I communicate with family and friends, receive important messages from the companies I transact with, and, within Yahoo! Mail, where I chat with my Facebook buddies. That’s why we’re obsessed with keeping phishers out of your Yahoo! Mail.
On that note, I’m happy to announce the release of Yahoo! Mail Anti-Phishing Platform (YMAP), which further reinforces the trust and security of the Yahoo! Mail experience using existing email authentication technologies. It builds on the pilot anti-phishing program we ventured into with eBay/PayPal back in 2007, but this time we’re casting a wider net on the phishing problem.
So, what does this mean for you?
Put simply, we’re beefing up Yahoo! Mail’s SpamGuard by adding more security measures that make it much harder for phishers to get to your mailbox. We’ve teamed up with email authentication partners—namely, Authentication Metrics, eCert, Return Path, and Truedomain—to gain significant coverage to protect the prime targets of phishing attacks. Our partners work with top brands and email senders to audit, monitor, and protect email traffic using their domains. This collaboration enables us to apply policies to protect the authenticated emails using the domains of well-known online services–from popular social networks like Facebook to often-targeted institutions in the banking industry.
While this project is still in its early stages of deployment, we will be rolling it out aggressively during the coming months so that Yahoo! Mail users, along with the expanding list of companies participating in the program, are better protected from the perilous plague of phishing. It’s just another way we’re beating away bandits from your mailbox.
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/yahoomail/abuse/abuse-09.html
This sounds like a good development, although what would be really useful for me is a way I could report the phishing e-mails (and other spam) including full headers to the relevant authorities/ISPs automatically, perhaps using some kind of macro functionality in Yahoo’s webmail. Currently, I use a number of mailing lists for different kinds of spam and send them reports one by one, as well as using SpamCop and Yahoo’s spam reporting button to try to keep the problem under control.
Hi Carlo
Can you enlighten me as to how I can block a friend’s e-mail from coming in?
Thanks
Joe
Great stuff!
First and foremost I say “Good,” phishers, conmen and women, fraudsters, etc- create a nightmare scenario that ,in some,probably many instances is insurmountable and just has to be lived with-irrespective of a persons innocence! – which, Ive discovered through personal experience, amounts to nothing to the credit reference agencies. The organisations that haven t been paid still hold the victim accountable if the culprits cannot be traced ,or brought to court. A victimless crime Ive heard- “No one gets hurt ” ha ! “Tell that to the Marines” as Churchill quoted.
Thank you YAHOO! I love Ya! you’re the BEST!!
Thank you YAHOO! I love Ya!! You are the BEST!!
love this article
thanks for this article. i enjoyed reading.
Really looking forward to this new Spam/Phishing catcher. I delete 99% of anything that lands in YahooMail’s Spam folder anyway, but maybe this will keep that folder empty. :P
Ron