Several e-mail providers and financial-service providers have come together to create DMARC, a working group of 15 companies that will promote a standard set of technologies to reduce phishing e-mails and better secure your e-mail.

A phishing e-mail tries to trick you into thinking the message is from a legitimate source, such as a your bank or other such company or organization you do business with, in order to gain access to your password information, bank accounts, credit cards, and the like.

Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, PayPal, and others, including financial institutions such as Bank of America and Fidelity Investments, have created the program to block phishing attempts. DMARC, which is short for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance, officially launched today.

As it stands now, e-mail senders don't always authenticate every message they send. DMARC standardizes how e-mail receivers perform email authentication, and aims to help both e-mail senders and receivers work together to better secure e-mails. So senders will have consistent authentication results for messages at AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo, as well as other e-mail receivers implementing DMARC.

On the website, DMARC's creators describe its importance as follows:

With the rise of the social Internet and the ubiquity of e-commerce, spammers and phishers have a tremendous financial incentive to compromise user accounts, enabling theft of passwords, bank accounts, credit cards, and more. Email is easy to spoof and criminals have found spoofing to be a proven way to exploit user trust of well-known brands. Simply inserting the logo of a well-known brand into an email gives it instant legitimacy with many users.

The DMARC system of authentication makes two authentication screening mechanisms (SPF and DKIM) part of an industry standard.

According to the Wall Street Journal, PayPal has been using the authentication technologies with Yahoo's email service since 2007 and with Google's since 2008, and is now blocking around 200,000 fake emails per day.

DMARC - What is it? [DMARC]
Email Giants Move to Slash 'Phishing' [Wall Street Journal]