All mail readers (that I know of) can show you the URL behind a link in email without actually clicking on it. Just how depends on your mail reader. With some practice you can check the URL to see if it "makes sense". E.g. if it is a an https link to a site whose hostname ends with democraticunderground.com it's likely a valid link to/from DU.
An additional sanity check is to examine all the raw email headers. Again, with some practice you can recognize (in the Received-From header lines) whether or not the mail was created and delivered from a reputable site.
I see a lot of email pretending to be from my bank but coming from sites in Russia or Italy (among others). It's obvious from the hostnames in the Received-From headers. Note the "From" header is trivially forged; don't believe it. Normally bogus links in email are pretty obvious if you take a second to review them before clicking.
Ofc this is all insane. Sadly the email protocols were developed back in the day when it was a closed network of trustable folks (the Arpanet) and "spam" wasn't a thing yet. Worse, we have absolutely no enforcement of existing laws against fraud and phishing. It feels to me like the wild west before the sheriff came to town.
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