MainSleaze

Integrated solar photovoltaics construction company Onyx Solar, a company whose field fascinates me and whose mailings I could have seen myself asking for, is spamming role addresses (email addresses assigned to a role, such as sales or webmaster, instead of a person) and other email addresses that were scraped from old web pages. They are using FAGMS.de, a subsidiary of ESP Cheetahmail, itself a subsidiary of Experian. This isn’t a list of addresses that I would expect a legitimate company to be sending bulk email to, or an ESP not to have immediately caught as dirty. What happened?

Worst is the statement in the email claiming that the law in Spain (which has no relevance outside of Spain) not only allows, but justifies, collection of these email addresses into a database for opt-out spamming. I would have expected to find such nonsense in an email sent by a company that doesn’t understand that laws are not relevant outside of the country in which they were made law. (We see enough claims of CAN-SPAM compliance as justification for sending spam.) But CheetahMail knows better. Does their German subsidiary not know better? (

Sending IPs: 62.27.57.64/27

Spam Sample:

Actual Headers:

Received: from smtpsrv<xxx>.fagms.de (smtpsrv<xxx>.fagms.de [62.27.57.<xxx>])
        by <xxx> (Postfix) with ESMTP id <xxx>
        for <xxx>; Thu, 20 Oct 2011 10:xx:xx -0500 (CDT)
X-EMID: <xxx>
X-EMMAIL: <xxx>
List-Unsubscribe: <http://newsletter.onyxsolar.com/host/h.php?<xxx>>
From: "Onyx Solar" <nl@onyxsolar.com>
Reply-To: "<xxx>" <<xxx>@newsletter.onyxsolar.com>
To: <xxx>
Subject: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Building_Integrated_photovoltaics_n=BA10?=
Content-Type: text/html;
  charset="ISO-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Message-Id: <<xxx>@<xxx>.fagms.de>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2011 17:xx:xx +0200

Readable Email:

From: Onyx Solar <nl@onyxsolar.com>
To: <spamtrap>
Subject: Building Integrated photovoltaics
Reply-To: <xxx> <<xxx>@newsletter.onyxsolar.com>

Onyx Solar – Buildings That Generate Energy

This photovoltaic skylight represents a multifunctional solution by generating free electricity from the sun on-site and adding bioclimatic properties to the building; in this way, it allows day-lighting, it filters harmful UV and IR radiation and it provides thermal inner comfort. The avoidance of premature ageing of materials will extend its lifespan.

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According to the spanish law LOPD 15/1999 from 13th of December we inform that your personal data have been collected by previous authorized operations or publicly available sources. They were included in an automatic data base, property of ONYX SOLAR ENERGY and will be processed in order to establish business relationship. Data thus obtained will only be used for sending information about news and services related to our sector. The data are available and you can change, disable or delete them sending a mail to nl@onyxsolar.com. You also can exercise your rights according to the established regulations in this law consulting www.agpd.es.