Presenting at this year's Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, Alex Stamos, CISO at Yahoo, shared the news with the audience.
The new feature of its Mail system, which will be implemented by 2015 and is a collaborative effort that included Google, will allow Yahoo Mail users to send and receive encrypted messages from other Yahoo account holders, as well as from Gmail users. Only senders and recipients will be able to read the messages.
"We as an industry have failed…to keep users safe," Stamos said.
Following the Snowden leaks, major tech firms bolstered their privacy offerings for customers. Last spring reports surfaced that Google was looking into ways to integrate PGP encryption into its Gmail service.