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.

What were you trying to do when you received the email? I'm not sure what "I tipped a verify your email address link" means...

...saying "verify your email address." It seemed to come from DU.

It read:

" Confirm it's you. Thanks for using Link at Democratic Underground. To confirm it's you please verify your email address.

What's Link? A safe way to pay faster at Democratic Underground..."

It came shortly after I donated so somehow it knew I did that.

For the record I have two email addresses, one for private political and energy issues, and one for family business, professional associations, health, etc.

I usually donate to DU on the private political and energy address, but this time, I carelessly and mistakenly used the family address.

Any insight?

but DU did not send it to you, it was sent from Link, which is the payment method you used to purchase your Star Membership.

The new Stripe payment processing that we're using as an alternative to PayPal allows you to choose a number of different payment methods, and it seems you chose Link as your method. When doing this, you entered your email address on the Stripe processing page -- that's so it can send you a receipt. In this case it seems that after you made the payment via Link, Link is now asking you to confirm your email address with them.

I can see at our end that the payment went through successfully, so I don't think you need to confirm your email with Link if you don't want to.