If you have registered any other Sim- games, such as SCS or any Sims 2 EPs, or if you had subscribed to the Sims 3 site, you may receive occasional e-mails from fun.ea.com.
However, a little vigilance and caution is a good thing. A favorite technique for phishers is to make the embedded link in their message appear to be authentic by using subtle misspellings like replacing 1 or I for l, or by registering a domain that looks very similar to the actual domain they're trying to spoof.
Any time you receive an unsolicited email, regardless of the source, that contains an embedded link, it is important that you never click the link in the e-mail! - especially if the message appears to be urgent, telling you that you will lose access to something if you don't act "right away". Instead, open your web browser and type in the URL manually, going by what you know, and not by literally typing in the URL in the message letter for letter.
One more thing: Your email address does not necessarily have to be publicly available anywhere. If you use a common mail server such as Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, or widely-used ISPs such as Verizon, Comcast, or RoadRunner, you may be subject to what's known as "dictionary spam". This is where the spammer or phisher blasts a specific ISP with hundreds of thousands of copies of the message, using a computer program to generate email addresses, in the hopes that even a small percentage of them match an actual username. Worse, these messages may contain images or "web bugs" (typically 1px by 1px images) that are loaded from the spammer's server upon opening the message, thus logging your IP address. Clicking any "opt-out" links in the message simply confirms your e-mail address as valid and places it on the mailing list of every spammer in the world.
Lastly, if you are using Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express, you should consider switching to a more secure e-mail client such as Mozilla Thunderbird. Thunderbird is generally very good about catching phishing attempts and will alert you to the suspicious message as a possible scam. It also stops images from auto-loading unless the sender is in your address book.
