Fonecta: Outsourcing spam ops to Ixonos
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.
Fonecta’s address lists contain outdated and erroneous personal information. It’s not just garbage that’s still in the Finnish Business Information System that all the other players are reselling as well; it’s their very own special brand of garbage sauce, addresses that once might have been in the biz info system but were removed by the owners and either replaced with other email addresses or removed altogether… but nonetheless retained by Fonecta. Even spam apologists seem to hate them. (And of course everybody reading this site remembers that it took them 18 months to remove all information regarding a domain that had changed hands from a biz to a private person.)
Spam sample: Pointless. Too many. There’s Vistaprint, there’s several branches of spamming activity that have to do with the spammer Janne Laitinen, there’s collection agencies, time tracking for employers, IT educators…
Spamming IP: Various hostnames mailX.kontaktikone-app7.os.ixonos.com in 62.61.85.0/24. A cursory check of rDNS indicates that services are being provided to Nokia development from the same range (with IPs happily mixed in, of course), and a post on Nokia’s developer board suggests the same. There’s at least one IP assigned to the Finnish National Board of Education, too.
Ixonos reply? “In a meeting with Fonecta, we have agreed that they themselves will take care of all communications and information regarding this, because after all it is related to services provided by themselves or their customers. You should have been contacted by [two names omitted]. Have they?” No, they haven’t, and it would have been pointless had they.