Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, PayPal go after phishers with new e-mail authentication effort

Major e-mail providers, including Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! are teaming up with PayPal, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more, to implement a new system for authenticating e-mail senders to try to prevent the sending of fradulent spam and phishing messages.

The protocol that powers e-mail, SMTP, dates back to a more trusting era; a time when the only people who sent you e-mails were people you wanted to send you e-mails. SMTP servers are willing to accept pretty much any e-mail destined for a mailbox they know about (which is, admittedly, an improvement on how things used to be, when they'd accept e-mails even for mailboxes they didn't know about), a fact which spammers and phishers exploit daily.

Making any fundamental changes to SMTP itself is nigh impossible; there are too many e-mail servers, and they all have to interoperate with each other, an insurmountable hurdle for any major change. So what we're left with is all manner of additional systems that are designed to give SMTP servers a bit more information about the person sending the e-mail, so that they can judge whether or not they really want to accept the message.

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