MainSleaze

According to Kauppalehti, the Finnish trade/commerce newspaper, Fonecta has had to shut down the email parts of its Kontaktikone spam machine because of Spamhaus listings.

The report is full of untruths, half-truths and evasion. But what do you expect.

• Fonecta is trying to outsource the responsibility for poor mailing list management to its customers, when everybody knows that it is the poor data Fonecta itself is selling that is at stake.
• Fonecta claims that the SBL issue only arose recently. SBL166774 has been there since the end of November, although the date on the listing is January 15 now after some recent update (apparently an escalation from the /27 to the /26). SBL142215 has been there since June 8, although the date on the listing is August 23 now after some update. Just clicking on the “Fonecta” tag on this blog site shows a past history that completely undermines the “it only happened today!!!” argument.
• Fonecta tries to argue the point that B2B spam is legal in Finland. Yes it is, unfortunately, but the Spamhaus criteria for listing don’t seem to say legal spam is any better than illegal spam. Examples quoted in the Spamhaus listings contain B2B entries as well.

I don’t believe for a second that Kontaktikone or Fonecta’s email marketing efforts in general will improve after this temporary break. I also don’t believe that Fonecta plans to stop selling email lists (which in itself is abominable) that contain poor data, for example outdated and erroneous personal data in supposedly B2B lists.