After a while you get a feel for stuff like this. I don't think a company would e-mail you about something like this when they could CALL you.
When something is really important, you get a phone call (assuming they have your phone number) or a knock at your door.
You don't get an e-mail telling you that you won the lottery. You get a letter sent by registered mail, delivered by a hired courier in person. You also don't get real "good news" like this via third class "To Matthew or Current Resident" junk mail.
It's all about being prudent and using some common sense.
I will admit that those who are less computer savvy fall prey to these things all the time -- it's sad that people get exploited in this way.
I might be the devil's advocate here, but I in fact do like when people get burnt like that. Then they can start being a bit more smart, it is completely understandable that someone who lives in a jungle can fall for things like that. However, most people that fall for stuff like that is through their own fault. They have been living in a world, where they are surrounded with computers and never bothered to learn one bit. To take even a few minutes a day to actual security practices. So the only way I see when people learn, is after they have been scammed like 20 times. Its a small price to pay, but it certainly serves as motivation for people to start looking into better alternatives, security concerns in email etc...
Ergo, we need to start taking responsibility as much as possible and quit trying to blame guberment or your dad or whoever else. Even the police is not out there to protect you (yes this includes women also, children well that is the duty of parents), that is your own duty. They can arrive after the fact 10-20 minutes after you have been robbed or killed or whatever else. Its this sort of mental crutch that has kept people from learning the basics of self-defense or buying a gun for personal self-defense etc... The self-entitlement, that you can simply pay someone to take care of everything for you.
I would advice folks to use one email account for all online accounts, mailing lists, newsletters, etc... Another one to correspond strictly for personal friends, non business related. Also try to make those you email have personal signatures, this helps identify that it truly was him and not some spam bot sending you email. Unfortunately, because everyone is so interested in spamming you with advertising (email providers) they have never taken care of the security issues that it comes along. You would think that after so many years of PGP being available they would have already set up automatic email encryption among users of the same @domains. So take a gmail account to another gmail account should automatically have it encrypted with self-signed signatures also etc... They haven't done that yet (I believe they are going to add some extension real soon), but mostly because encrypted email can't be scanned for advertising purposes.