I wanted to know if this website is real

babowa wrote:

Do you think that email address (the only thing I could make out in the upper right corner) is a legit email address? I was not sure especially since it could be but be re-directed to a scam site.

That is definitely a legitimate e-mail address. That doesn't mean much. Why would a scammer provide their own e-mail address?They want people to click, not reply. Of course, there is no way without looking at the internal headers of the message to say for sure that it originated from Apple.

Reggie wrote:

From a domain that is c.apple.com? And I haven't had a marketing email from Apple to a link to the App Store in like...ever.

The domain is "apple.com" and Apple definitely owns that. Anything that appears to the left of ".apple.com" is whatever the brilliant minds at Apple can think of that day and get someone in corporate DNS management to approve.

But again, this is a screen shot, so all bets are off. I don't even think it is a screenshot from Apple Mail. It might be Gmail or something. It is possible to fake out a domain such that it appears to look like "c.apple.com" but redirect to something else. It is also possible to do other clever tricks around that.

But the truth is, none of that matters in the least. I can guarantee that Apple regularly sends out e-mail messages like this. It's not just Apple either - all companies do it. The more often a company lectures you about how to spot a phishing attack, the more often it sends out legitimate e-mails to its own customers that tick every box in guide about how to spot a phishing attack. Why else would scammers do it? They know that people can't tell the difference. And it isn't because people are stupid. It is because companies do this millions of times a day, 24x7. Dollar for dollar, they make more money from it than the phishing scammers do.

There are a few things about this particular message, and some that I've received, that make them a little bit more suspect. For one thing, this e-mail was (originally) in Hebrew. It looks like they sent an English-language version too, but this is still an off-brand market for Apple. Those don't get the same level of attention from Apple. If you are in the US and only get consumer mailings, then Apple makes sure those are perfect. But anything outside the US, or outside mainstream consumer markets, you just have to go with your instinct. Based on your past interactions with this particular off-brand team at Apple, is this the kind of e-mail that Apple would send? Last year at this time, didn't Apple send out an e-mail to lots of people asking them to test "Bug Sur"? Freudian slip or just normal non-consumer e-mail quality?