Possibly following a certain difficulty in sending spam from their own IP address range, Fonecta have entered into a strategic business partnership with Ixonos (a Finnish provider of IT services). Now Fonecta spam is being sent from the Ixonos cloud instead as of mid-September 2012 or so.
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This has been going on for a long time. I think I started receiving it in April 2012. I opted my own biz address out of it during the summer, but I continue to see the same spam in spamtraps. It was also discussed on a Finnish LinkedIn group. Some of the spamtraps constitute outdated and erroneous personal information, the processing of which is completely illegal under Section 9, Paragraph 2 of the Personal Data Act. There is no indication of the address source, but certain key facts suggest it might be Bisnode or one of the other more international players who deal in Finnish leads.
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Country Inns & Suites, part of the Carson Hotels chain, recently started sending bulk email to a spamtrap email address that has never received email before. As with yesterday’s spam report, I saw delivery attempts in my mail log and enabled the email address a few weeks ago. The ESP is Epsilon, via its subsidiary Bigfoot Interactive.
It looks like Bisnode has a campaign of “helping” non-profits out by spamming on their behalf. This, too, was sent to an address scraped from the web page of the biz. Hengitysliitto is the Finnish Breathing Association, a non-profit dedicated to helping people suffering from breathing disorders. The message doesn’t even attempt to indicate the address source. Let’s see what Apsis has to say about this one.
Regus Finland Oy, my old friend (see previous posts 1, 2, 3, 4) are spamming to sell their temp office facilities. As with the other post today, I saw this in an address harvested from the web page of the biz, and have seen it in spamtraps as well. The ESP is the French Edatis, an acquaintance of mine from a very, very long time ago in this sordid context.
Pelastusarmeija, aka the Finnish branch of the Salvation Army, is spamming businesses to solicit contributions. The partner in spam is Bisnode/Soliditet, an operation that specialises in the generation and sale of leads, and who are apparently a customer of Apsis, a Swedish ESP who at least in private conversations proffer a policy of disallowing the use of purchased lists. (Guys, if you read this, posting a link on your website to your Acceptable Use Policy would not be a stupid move, and commenting here would be welcome.)
An organization that I did not see or hear from during the recent U.S. Presidential election campaign, The Tea Party, began sending email a couple of days after the election to a brand new shiny spamtrap at a domain that I have owned for some time. This spamtrap has not previously received email from anybody: I enabled it last week after I reviewed my mail logs and noticed that somebody was trying to send email to it. The IP that sent this email belongs to ESP Sendgrid. The domain that sent this email, pd25.com, belongs to what I thought was a rival ESP, ExactTarget. The authorized use policies (AUP) of both ESPs decidedly require that bulk email sent through them be sent only to email addresses that opted in.
German advertising agency Pepperos Media GmbH is spamming an email address that never existed, offering the spamtrap easy loans and instant cash payouts. The email looks like a scam, but was sent by Optivo, a respected German ESP whose terms and conditions do not permit the sending of unsolicited bulk email (spam).
U.S. woolen manufacturer Woolrich, which has been in operation since the early 1800s, just started sending bulk email advertisements to an email address that never existed at a domain that has not been live for over seven years. The ESP is ExactTarget.
This was sent to my business address, the use of which I’ve forbidden from the sender no later than September 19, 2011. This is a repeat of a spam sent on September 28. It says “You have received this offer because you have subscribed to our newsletter.” Well surprise surprise, the biz didn’t. The domain name mentioned for complaints is expired and leads nowhere, so you can’t actually write to “them”, and you can’t view the URL that supposedly contains the address source, because the domain is parked.
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