Spoof from Internal Revenue Service (IRS)

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

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.

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

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:

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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).