Email authentication has reduced phishing, Google

The development of email authentication standards has finally reduced email phishing scams, according to Googlesecurity researchers. 

Elie Bursztein, Google's anti-abuse research lead, and Vijay Eranti, Gmail's anti-abuse technical lead, said that these authentication standards, called DomainKey Identified Email (DKIM) and Sender Policy Framework (SPF), are now in widespread use, CNET reports. 

Internet industry and standards groups have been working since 2004 to get email providers to use authentication to put a halt to e-mail address imitation. 
According to the report, more than 3.5 million domains that are active on a weekly basis use the SPF standard, when sending email via SMTP servers, and nearly half-a-million email sending and receiving domains that are active weekly adopted the DKIM standards.