Important Message to Our Customers Concerning Spam Blocking

Spam control software features are designed to block "junk" email or email from unknown or unwanted senders.  However, these blocking techniques may cause the unintended consequence of blocking messages that you really want to receive. 

You may not receive our e-mail reply to your inquiry if:  

• Your internet service provider offers a Spam blocking feature that requires the sender (i.e., the IRS) to first respond to a return email in order to be added to a "white list" or approved sender list
  
  
• You have purchased software for your personal computer that requires the sender (i.e., the IRS) to first respond to a return email in order to be added to an approved sender list  
  
  
• You have manually created an approved sender list
  
  
• Other Spam blocking techniques are employed by you or your internet service provider       

Taking the following steps will decrease the possibility that our reply to your inquiry will be blocked:

1. Add the appropriate IRS source e-mail address(es) to your "approved sender" or "white list".  This must be done for all of the IRS lists that you choose to subscribe. All of the IRS source e-mail addresses that you will need to add are constructed as follows:
   
   IRS Source e-Mail Construct:    listname@lists.qai.irs.gov
   
   Example:    alabama@lists.qai.irs.gov
   
   Note: All Source e-Mail addresses are lower case. States with two words in the name are separated with a hyphen and no spaces.
   
   Example:   new-york@lists.qai.irs.gov
   
   Important:  Please do not attempt to correspond directly with the IRS using the source e-mail address.  You must use the web interface to sign-up to all IRS e-Mail  lists.   
   
   
2. If you use software that looks at the subject line of the message, please add the following subject line to your approved list:  IRS e-News For Tax Professionals. 

The IRS will continue to work with internet service providers and Spam Blocking software companies in order to find  solutions to the problem created by the proliferation of Spam email.  However, there is no immediate solution that will address the wide variety of Spam blocking techniques currently being used, so we ask for your patience and assistance.