Millions of people over the years have received bogus emails claiming to have originated from the IRS, the tax collection agency for the United States.  Such an attack occurred again recently, which prompted the IRS to issue a statement on June 30, 2011 where they explicitly state that they do not send emails to taxpayers in this manner.

"The IRS doesn't send unsolicited emails to taxpayers about their tax accounts and doesn't communicate payment information through email," said the agency.

In order to entice on a bogus link which redirects the unwary to a web page that will attempt to capture personal information said that payments made the Electronic Federal Tax Payment System

If you ever get a notice from the IRS by email like this, do NOT click through and give out information.

Clients using MostHost Cloud Secure Email were not affected by this attack since all email is filtered 'in the cloud' and will never hit their inbox.