Blizzard is Handing Out Seven Days of Free WoW Game Time to Past Subscribers

Yesterday afternoon the following email showed up in my inbox from Newsletter@email.blizzard.com:

Nothing too exciting, right? Blizzard has done this in the past and I remember receiving a similar offer when Cataclysm was released a couple of years ago. I was an active WoW subscriber for almost four years--as I've mentioned previously--and it always seems like Blizzard tries to reel me back in every few months.

Things got interesting when I mentioned the email to a friend. He hadn't received one. Cue the alarm bells.

The safe bet with anything game-account-related in an email is to ignore any link provided and log into the game's website yourself. Upon logging into the Battle.net site I wasn't greeted with anything special and couldn't find any mention of this supposed promotion. Gmail delivered the email to my normal inbox; it looked 100% legit and as far as I could tell the email header checked out. "Newsletter@email.blizzard.com" is the address that sends out the Blizzard Insider email newsletter, and the IP address given within the header matches previous Blizzard emails that I've received. Here's a couple of lines from the header for reference:

Received-SPF: pass (google.com: domain of Newsletter@email.blizzard.com designates 12.129.200.219 as permitted sender) client-ip=12.129.200.219;
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=pass (google.com: domain of Newsletter@email.blizzard.com designates 12.129.200.219 as permitted sender) smtp.mail=Newsletter@email.blizzard.com;

I checked reddit and found a few posts from users who had received the same email. Still afraid to click the link within the email itself, I instead went with the following URL that was offered on reddit--since we're talking about phishing schemes here I'll let you copy/paste the URL yourself.

https://www.worldofwarcraft.com/account/claim-promotion.html?promoId=SEVEN_DAYS_PROMOTION

Following that link prompts you to log into your account and claim the free week of game time. I manually re-logged into the Battle.net site and was able to confirm that the time was added to my previously dead account:

If you play Blizzard games anything close to regularly you should consider attaching an Authenticator to your account if you haven't already. The Authenticator adds an extra layer of security to login attempts by requiring you to enter a six-digit code that is randomly generated every minute or so. There are free apps for iOS/Android/Blackberry/Windows Phone in addition to a physical keychain Authenticator that's available in the Blizzard store for $6.50.

In the end I highly doubt I'll renew, but hey, free is free right?

tl;dr - The email is authentic; copy/paste the worldofwarcraft.com link above to confirm if you're still on the fence.