>>>>If this URL is malformed (not something.morething.com or xxx.yyy.zzz.qqq but containing a bunch of stuff and then having a @ somewhere in the middle) it's a safe bet that it's not safe. It's scam/spam/sham.
>>>
>>>Thank you for your input. So far, everything looks very legit.
>>
>>One more thing: launch cmd.exe and tracert the url you got. See where it goes. Sometimes you may find your bank in Ukraine, China or France or any other surprisingly strange place ;).
>
>When you are saying to trace it, you mean by PINGing the url IP?

No, TRACERT is a separate command. It shows you all the intermediate steps a message passes through.

Try the following from a command window:

tracert www.google.com

Or any other address you are interested in.

PING just tells you whether the destination could be reached, or not.

For those interested in the technical details: traceroute (tracert on Windows) sends out a packet with a TTL (time-to-live) of 1. After the first hop (router or similar), the packet is not sent any further, and a message is sent back.

Then, another packet with a TTL of 2 is sent out. This one goes over two hops before the TTL goes down to zero, and the corresponding message is sent back. This is continued until the final destination is reached (for a maximum of 30 hops).

(TTL is an attribute of each IP packet; it gets decremented on each hop. When it reaches zero, the packet is not sent any further. The idea is to reduce superfluous traffic in the case of accidental routing loops.)