Phishing e-mail scams have become a plague on the Internet. The biggest phishing attacks in the past couple months are fake e-mails from the IRS (Internal Revenue Service), Yahoo! lottery wins and other fake lottery winning notifications. Such popularity is alarming, and it makes more important than ever to be prepared to withstand phishing attacks. Preventing phishing attacks is much better than cure after a nervous breakdown at the sight of an empty bank account, isn't it?

Main tips that will help you prevent phishing are:

1. If you have no account with the organization in the e-mail subject field, delete the mail without reading it.
2. If you have an account with the company, open the e-mail without clicking any link inside. Read the contents. If there is any hint that you have won something or are entitled to some "tax rebate", delete the scammy e-mail.
3. If you read the e-mail and, thinking it is legitimate, click the link in it, check if the URL in the address bar of your browser coincides with the hyperlink in your e-mail. If they differ, close the site as quickly as possible and delete the e-mail. Scammers tend to use symbols in URL that are similar to "/", so that http://www.google.com/adsense might look like http://www.google.com|adsense|sgfsdgfhjsdfghsdfghgryegfeyrfggfwugfwgef.freehost.com. As the URL is too long, a surfer does not see it in full and may not know he or she is being cheated.
4. If you are prompted to type your login or password into some fields on the site you landed to after clicking a link in your e-mail, it is a 99% phishing site.

Basically, I would recommend to bear in mind that cheese only comes free in mouse traps, so any information from a Web site about your non-existent winning tickets can't but disclose a phishing attack. Use any legitimate, trusted anti-phishing software, even Firefox will do. Better safe than sorry.