We all know someone who got a bogus e-mail from their “PayPal” or “eBay” account only to learn it was some scammer’s ploy to get their user name and password.

One way to combat the threat of phished messages is to try Iconix eMail ID, a free tool that identifies fake messages from people trying to impersonate trusted senders.

It is a free download and works with most of the online Web mail products as well as Outlook and Outlook Express.

It works like this: Messages that really come from any of about 300 authentic banks or Web companies will include a small Iconix logo next to the subject line. If the icon is missing, that’s a warning. (If you see no icon, it might also be that the business is small or not yet included in the Iconix trusted company group.)

It’s not a perfect savior, but it does what it claims to do.

Firefox plugin Image Zoom

When stories recently suggested there was a naked woman reflected in the sunglasses of a certain politician, I knew I had the perfect browser tool for the job.

It’s a plugin for Mozilla Firefox called Image Zoom. It’s free (and only available for Firefox). Once installed it allows quick and easy zooms of any image on a Web page.

PicLens

Another handy browser plugin, available for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari, is PicLens. When you visit photo sites like Flickr, Yahoo Photos or Photobucket, PicLens gives you several ways to browse, organize, stream or view images on that site.

First it takes a group of 100 of the images available and creates a display wall, then lets you scroll those images in a slideshow.

Images can be enlarged, saved to your desktop or sent to others. It’s free and is fun to use when exploring sites loaded with great images.