The subject matter is serious and is similar to the story we published yesterday about fraudulent invoices. The message is clear: if you get an email saying you owe money to the Intellectual Property Office, it's not genuine. But that's not why this story is written.

Some years ago, the UK government's information services were revamped and a centralised email newsletter service was created. All countries (we think) have a special designation for government addresses. In the USA it's .gov. Everywhere else it's .gov (or go).[country code] so for the UK, we'd expect it to be .gov.co.uk or even .gov.uk.

But no, when the people who set it up decided on a name, they went with govdelivery.com. So what?

Well, only governments can (if the system works) set up .gov... style addresses but anyone can set up a .com address. And no one checks if the person setting it up is entitled to use it. So there is absolutely no guarantee that govdelivery.com is an official UK service (it is, don't panic).

But to the casual observer, it's a question: if it's a government address, why isn't it a .gov... address?

So, back to the false invoices: anyone who's a bit switched on will probably have rejected a mail containing an invoice if the address wasn't ipo.gov.uk or somesuch.

And, as the Welsh might say, "here's funny" - if you type ipo.gov.uk into your browser, it goes to https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/intellectual-property-office which is a UK government webpage where (once you've scrolled down and found out that there is content below the UK GOv's ego banners) there's interesting information including some stuff about discussions over copyright for material plundered by bots for use in computer-generated material.