MainSleaze

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  Some of the spamtraps constitute outdated and erroneous personal information, the processing of which is completely illegal under Section 9, Paragraph 2 of the Personal Data Act.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.

The ISP in charge of the sending IP, netrics hosting ag, is not even bothering to respond to complaints (ticket NE-00118104 created Sep 29, 2012 has not been responded to save for the autoreply), the ISP in charge of hosting the unsub site (Hetzner) is doing just as much ([AbuseID:08BE04:1C] created Sep 29, 2012 has not been responded to save for the autoreply) and the ISP in charge of the hosting, domainfactory GmbH, is doing their very verbose best to pretend they care while ignoring the matter in [domainfactory.de #3540733].  (Conversation included below. Section 8 of their AUP looks all right as far as my poor understanding of German and automatic translations go; it seems it’s not worth the toilet roll it’s printed on.)

Spamming IP: 81.18.24.177

Spam headers:

Return-Path: <survey@euwifomonitor.ch>
Received: from swissvc510110v1.swissv.ch (SwissVC510110V1.swissv.ch [81.18.24.177])
        by x (Postfix) with ESMTP id x
        for <x>; Thu, 15 Nov 2012 05:mm:ss +0200 (EET)
Received: from localhost (unknown [46.4.22.46])
        by swissvc510110v1.swissv.ch (Postfix) with ESMTP id x
        for <x>; Thu, 15 Nov 2012 04:mm:ss +0100 (CET)
MIME-Version: 1.0
From: "Stefan J. Lang" <survey@euwifomonitor.ch>
Subject: Osallistumiskutsu EUWIFO Business Monitor -kyselyyn marraskuussa 2012
X-Mailer: Microsoft Office Outlook 12.0
Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2012 04:mm:ss +0100
Priority: normal
X-Priority: 3 (Normal)
X-Message-Code: x-x-x---
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
        boundary="=_x"
To: x
Message-Id: <timestamp.x@swissvc510110v1.swissv.ch>

Human-readable spam content:

EUWIFO AG
The European Economic Research Institute
Stefan James Lang

Rigistrasse 9
Puhelin
+41 (0)44 344 5680
8006 Zurich
Internet
www.euwifo.ch
Switzerland
Sähköposti

stefan.j.lang@euwifo.ch

Olkaa hyvä ja välittäkää seuraaville henkilöille: [NAME STRUCK. RANDOMLY PICKED PERSON FROM SAID BIZ].
EUWIFO Business Monitor:
Liiketoiminnan odotuksia koskeva kysely menestyneille yrittäjille ja johtokunnan jäsenille Suomessa ja 36 muussa maassa ympäri maailman
Hyvä [NAME STRUCK. RANDOMLY PICKED PERSON FROM SAID BIZ],
Zürichissä, Sveitsissä sijaitseva European Economic Research Institute on erikoistunut globaaliin talous- ja pankkialaan liittyvien aiheiden tutkimukseen.
EUWIFO Business Monitor mittaa yrittäjien ja johtokunnan jäsenten arvioita koskien yrityksen nykytilannetta sekä  tulevaa kehitystä.
EUWIFO Business Monitor eroaa muista yrityssektorin mielialakyselyistä siinä, että sen kohteena ovat ainoastaan toimitus johtajat ja johtokunnan jäsenet, joilla on hallitseva osakkuus yrityksessään.
Täten kutsumme teidät, [NAME STRUCK. RANDOMLY PICKED PERSON FROM SAID BIZ], osallistumaan tähän tutkimukseen.
Aloittakaa kysely napsauttamalla tähän. Kyselyyn vastaaminen vie vain noin kolme minuuttia.
Vakuutamme, että kyselyn tarkoituksena on ainoastaan liiketoimintajakso- ja markkinatutkimus. Kaikkia annettuja tietoja käsitellään nimettömänä. Emme kysy henkilökohtaisia kysymyksiä. Tiedustelemme ainoastaan yleistä arviotanne yrityksenne nykytilanteesta sekä tulevasta kehityksestä. Tavoitteemme on ymmärtää liiketoimintajaksojen kehitystä Suomessa ja globaalissa taloudessa.
Halutessanne lähetämme mielellämme teille säännöllisesti tutkimuksemme tulokset ennen kuin ne julkaistaan tiedotusvälineissä.
Arvostamme osallistumistanne ja kiitämme teitä jo etukäteen.
Ystävällisin terveisin Zürichistä,
Stefan James Lang
Toimitusjohtaja

Mikäli ette halua vastaanottaa sähköposteja tulevaisuudessa, olkaa hyvä ja napsauttakaa tähän: http://d212.keyingress.de/?i_survey=6__x&tid=x&.

Domainfactory response 1:

We are currently waiting for a response of our customer. If our customer does not use double-opt-in addresses like you said, we will tell him to stop this. If you get other mails after we have talked to our customer, please contact us again.

Domainfactory response 2:

Our customer was currently not able, removing you from his list because there was no permission to give your email address to him. May we tell our customer your mail address so he can remove you from his list? Because your complaint is the only one, there was no reason to suspect our customer abusing harvested email addresses. You also can opt-out via the delisting link, which is provided in the email.

You also could send our customer a letter which tells, he must opt out you from his mailing list.

Domainfactory response 3:

Because your complaint about the newsletter, our customer sends was the only one, we just informed our customer to stop mailing to non-double-opt-in-addresses. We have now again contacted our customer and told him to stop that. Please notice, we can not verify anything if we wo not know the addresses, the customer sends to.

If you want, you could tell us, then we will blacklist them globally so nobody can send mails to it, too.

Our AGB are not available in english. The number 8.2 you mentioned takes affect if our customer sends newsletters to addresses where he knows that it is not allowed to write to. Because our customer can not know the email addresses where he sends to, this rule does not take effect in this cause.

We also asked our customer about double opt in addresses.

Domainfactory response 4:

the case is already open and we wait to a reply from our customer.

Please contact the Abuse-Team from the IP-Address which hav send the Spam too.

We reopen your Mail, when we get ne complaints or a answer from our customer.

Domainfactory response 5:

we dont received other complaints. Only you.
Please give us the rights to forwarding the spamtrap address to our customer, so he can delete it.