Have you ever received fake e-mails claiming to be sent by eBay or PayPal? For your safety I hope that you have ignored those messages because they were just dangerous scams known as phishing attacks.

But starting today Yahoo, PayPal and eBay have teamed up to fight against those fraudulent e-mails.

Thanks to DomainKeys e-mail authentication technology, Yahoo said that Yahoo Mail will offer to its customers a safer e-mail experience

Yahoo Mail is the first Web mail service to block these types of malicious messages for eBay and PayPal.

“eBay and PayPal’s adoption of e-mail authentication technology and this aggressive move on the part of Yahoo! Mail are significant steps forward in the fight to protect consumers against e-mail-based crimes,” said Michael Barrett, chief information security officer at PayPal. “While there is clearly no silver bullet for solving the problems of phishing and identity theft, today’s announcement is great news for our customers who rely on Yahoo! Mail.”

According to Yahoo it will takes several weeks until the technology upgrade will be roled out to all users of Yahoo Mail.

Currently, Yahoo boasts with more than 254 million Yahoo Mail accounts set up on its servers, compared to Microsoft’s only 224 million Hotmail accounts.

Also last month, in order to boost the reach of its e-mail service, Yahoo has signed a deal to acquire Zimbra, a company that provides NEXT generation e-mail services and collaboration software.