Some phishing emails can be difficult to spot, though others give themselves away with bad spelling and grammar.
But to save you from having to figure out which emails are genuine and which are sophisticated scams, a new feature in Google Mail can stop phishing emails ever reaching your Inbox, the company claims.
By working with eBay and PayPal, Google can now check the validity of any messages that claim to come from the online auction house or its online payments arm.
"Now any email that claims to come from "paypal.com" or "ebay.com" and their international versions is authenticated by Gmail and rejected if it fails to verify as actually coming from PayPal or eBay," said Brad Taylor, Google's spam czar.
Taylor expressed hope that other companies could help Google identify genuine emails.
"Our hope is that this will set a good example for other organisations to follow and that over time more and more email will become trustworthy," he said.
http://mail.google.com