The example given below is from the popular circulating email that usually threatens that, 'Yahoo! is shutting down' that I believe almost every Yahoo! account owner has received at least once. Below you will see a screen shot of this scam.

How do you recognize it? By learning as many many tips as possible.

Tips from this email:

1. As mentioned in the previous posts, Yahoo! is not shutting down.
2. Yahoo! is NOT running any random scanning program to verify email addresses for deletion of the unused ones.
   
3. The sender's email address is not an official company's contact address (in the image example below), Yahoo! Company does NOT bear such an email address as it's official contact address.
4. The email asks for personal data such as Username, Password, Date Of Birth and Country or Territory. Such information or details will NEVER be asked by Yahoo! if you already have an account with them, except when you register for a new one.
   
5. Emails coming from official Yahoo! Management will have a security icon (like the one shown below), therefore look for the DomainKeys icon and you'll see a small icon of an envelope and key in the email header. This verifies that it's from the domain it claims to be from.

Other tips:
- The use of puntuation marks excessively like the (!!!) in the From: and Subject: fields.
- Note also that there is no specified address in the To: field, thus an official address to a specified person will not come without your name in the 'To' field or in the introductory not at the beginning of the message (even simple mass mailing subscription services know how to identify their subscribers by their names).