Bank of America, Fidelity Investments and PayPal are part of a working group aiming to develop standards for reducing the threat of deceptive emails, such as spam and phishing.

It also includes 15 email service and technology providers like Google, Microsoft and Facebook.

"Email phishing defrauds millions of people and companies every year, resulting in a loss of consumer confidence in email and the Internet as a whole," says Brett McDowell, chair of DMARC.org and senior manager of customer security initiatives at PayPal. "Industry co-operation - combined with technology and consumer education - is crucial to fight phishing."

The intention is to introduce a standards-based framework, providing a more comprehensive and integrated way for email senders to introduce email authentication technologies into their infrastructure. For example, a sender could set policies to easily request a provider to discard unauthenticated email in order to block phishing attacks. The specification also creates a mechanism for email providers to send detailed reports back to email senders to help catch any gaps in the authentication system.

"BITS has been committed to defining and improving email authentication standards and practices to meet the financial services industry's needs. DMARC's evolutionary approach is critical in assuring these needs are met for years to come," says Paul Smocer, president at BITS, the technology policy division of The Financial Services Roundtable.

After gathering data and input from field usage of the technology, DMARC.org intends to submit its specification to the IETF for standardisation.

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