Spoof from Internal Revenue Service (IRS)

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I would say there is at least a 50% chance that it is legitimate. The Whois data for govdelivery.com states that the company is the leading provider of government to citizen e-mail and wireless communication services. While they don't list the IRS as a client, they do list the U.S. Departments of Labor, State, Agriculture, Transportation, and Commerce among other clients.

Ira Smilovitz

Raise that legitimacy estimate to over 95%. I thought the source address looked familiar. snipped-for-privacy@service.govdelivery.com is the source for all of the IRS e-mailings that I receive.

Ira Smilovitz

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data for govdelivery.com states that the company is the leading provider of government to citizen e-mail and wireless communication services. While they don't list the IRS as a client, they do list the U.S. Departments of Labor, State, Agriculture, Transportation, and Commerce among other clients.

Yes, they do list IRS as a client, and as mentioned, all my subscriptions to IRS notices come from this sender.

Further, I have clicked on the link in the e-mail, and it goes to a verified HTTPS (https://...) site (prometricsurvey.com) according to my browser.

What were the "Received:" headers in the message? The one that delivered to you can't be spoofed; "From" is extremely easy to spoof.

Seth

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I received it too. It came in on the mailbox address I used to sign up for my PTIN and ONLY for that purpose. No one else has that particular mailbox. Therefore, I conclude that it is either legitimate or that the IRS PTIN system is compromised.

Regardless, since the survey is not part of the purpose I gave them that mailbox for, I marked the message as spam with my provider (cc's to ).

Note: Fraudsters normally use "private [domain] registration." This entity did not.

Administrative Contact, Technical Contact: Sommerness, David snipped-for-privacy@govdelivery.com GovDelivery, Inc. 408 St. Peter St. Suite 600 SAINT PAUL, MN 55102 US (651) 726-7300 fax: (651) 665-0943

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It appears to be legitimate. I suscribe to a number of IRS email lists. I received an email (html version:

June 13th that describes the survey.

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on June 13th that describes the survey. OK, but that still doesn't give them the right to spam us with it.

If you consider it spam, go to irs.gov and cancel your account with them. If they send you stuff after that, report them to your ISP as a spammer.

purports

As I said earlier, they used the unique mailbox I gave to the PTIN server, which was NOT given to them to send general, non-PTIN-related news via. For e-mail to and from the IRS on other matters I use other mailboxes (depending on the nature of the message).