Thanks For The Beta Invite, Spammer.

In the interest of adding useful posts to my blog occasionally, I thought I would share some of the great mail messages Gmail has filtered into the spam folder for me.  Before I do that, however, I will show you what a real Blizzard mail message looks like.

Click to see it, but I'm sure you already got one of your own!

 That is one example of a real message from Blizzard.  Another example is of the recent message sent to those of us who manage parental controls for another account.

Bonafide mail from Blizzard, with personal info smudged.(Gmail was afraid, but I know this is the real thing. Someone else in my feed reader received one as well.)

Now, if you click on that image, you will notice that sentences make sense, there are capital letters in all the right spots, and if you have received this email, you will notice that the links go to where they should (best way to check without actually clicking is to mouse over the address that is hyper-linked. It should show where it is pointing to at the bottom left of your browser). 

For your entertainment, I will now post several images of email trying to make me believe they are from Blizzard. These range from fairly convincing to "OMG! Did you really think I would fall for that?".

Ignoring the red bar on each of these ( I daren't move them from my spam folder, they might bite!), you can see that each of these have problems with sentence structure, capitalization, and just failing at any order in their wording to resemble a native American English speaker. If you believed any of these for a second, you're normal, a second is all some people need to click a link. Be smart and take more than a second, calm down, and click responsibly. Know what to look for!  Blizzard will NEVER ask for account information through an email. 

This ends Spam Email Avoidance 101.  For your enjoyment, I have posted below some spam for an Aion account I have never had.  Long live my Gmail spam blocker!