[ by Melanie Gretchen ] E-mail service providers Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL are working to reduce "phishing" emails that attempt to trick recipients into thinking they come from a legitimate source. To this end, along with financial-service companies Bank of America, FMR's Fidelity Investments and eBay's PayPal, they have created DMARC.org, a group of 15 companies to promote a standard set of technologies that they say will lead to more secure email. Email authentication. The premise of the effort is that because senders don't always authenticate every message they send, recipients are dependent on complex and imperfect ways to distinguish trusted messages from potentially fradulent ones, backers say. Brett McDowell, chair of DMARC and a senior manager of PayPal, said senders need policies that tell e-mail providers how to deal with messages that aren't authenticated.  This will make it possible for the email provider to vouch for the authenticity of real e-mails, and block fake ones or label them as suspicious. If an email could be authenticated, businesses would be able to communicate with customers in new ways or previous ways that have been compromised by phishing attacks.  Currently, many companies advise customers not to trust e-mails with, say, an email from a bank telling him to follow a link to update his account information, and customers assume messages like that are phishing expeditions. While Mr. McDowell acknowledged the effort can't abolish e-mail fraud, hackers will need to find new addresses to launch their attacks: rather than fashioning an e-mail to look like it came paypal.com, the attack would come from "paypalpayments.com" or another fake site. For more details, go to [WSJ, 1/30/12].