Google's new Gmail service has been outfitted with a number of security features designed to thwart phishing con artists. Its new anti-phishing security measures are designed to alert users of suspected e-mail scams. The anti-phishing security feature disables hypertext links inside e-mails. Phishing scams typically involve redirecting users onto fraudulent sites once they have been lured by a cleverly disguised e-mail from a familiar company or service provider.

Gmail has also provided a prominent "Report Spam" button to its users. Any messages reported as spam get sent to a separate folder and Google's antispam software is notified. The company's help pages say that "the more spam you mark, the better our system will get at weeding out those annoying messages."

This is the latest in a series of innovations Google has made to hamper hackers and the like. In October 2004, DomainKeys were added to its e-mail servers. The technology, backed by Yahoo, tries to crosscheck e-mail messages to verify their origin. DomainKeys attaches encrypted digital tags to each e-mail. Each e-mail is then compared with a publicly-available database of legitimate addresses. Yahoo debuted the service on its own servers a month later.

These and other possible enhancements, such as adding further wireless device support through WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) or XHTML (Extensible HTML), are elements of Google's long-term effort to make Gmail the most feature-rich Web mail service available, a Google executive said.

"We want to make it the best e-mail service in every single dimension, so you have absolutely no reason to use any other," said Georges Harik, director of Googlettes, the company's term for new projects.