Scattered Thoughts

Even though I use GMail, I do have a Yahoo! mail account and on reading about how Yahoo! teamed up with eBay and Paypal to stop phishing scams, I might just have to reconsider my choice and switch to it permanently.
A while back Yahoo! backed a proposal to have a technology known as DomainKeys adopted as an Internet Standard. DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) as it came to be known became a standard in earlier in May 2007. How this works is that when an email is being sent, the sending server will add an encrypted digital signature to the header of the mail.
When this mail is received by the recipients mail server, the receiving server can authenticate the mail and be sure that it is not spam or a phishing attempt.
Ebay and Paypal servers have now added this header to their emails thereby enabling Yahoo! mail to sort the phishing attempts from the genuine mail a lot more effectively. Now obviously this method is not 100% safe, but it is a great step towards preventing the millions of internet users out there, who cannot tell a genuine email from a fake one, from getting scammed. There is a pretty good description of how this works at the Yahoo! Anti-Spam Resource Center.