Oct
18

(RESOLVED) Canal Plus newsletter: no bounce processing, not respecting opt-out, not responding to complaints

Canal Plus Finland, a brand name of the Swedish-based C More Entertainment Ab, a provider of premium TV services, is spamming addresses they know to be dead for two plus years via Basefarm Ab, a Swedish provider of Internet services.

Postmasters at canalplusnewsletter.com and basefarm.net have been informed of a domain having changed hands after August 31, 2009 on February 13, 2010 after attempts to deliver to invalid addresses resulting in 550 5.1.1 No such user were spotted in the mail logs. This resulted in no response, but more attempts of the same, so the same report was mailed to those two postmasters, along with abuse at basefarm.com and info at canalplus.se on February 26, 2010. That resulted in nothing either. The spam continues to the present day.

There is no RFC-Ignorant.org correlation of this, even in the removed entries, and nothing in my mailer-daemon folder.  It seems reasonable to conclude that the mails to required role accounts have been delivered. Another report was sent to abuse at basefarm.com today and delivered:

Postfix Log

Oct 18 10:48:48 myhostname postfix/smtp[31784]: 0597E7CC188: to=<abuse@basefarm.com>, relay=bf-mail.osl.basefarm.net[81.93.172.8]:25, delay=8.7, delays=0.12/0.01/5.6/2.9, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 OK id=1RG4Pm-0000Fa-3L)

Spamming IP: 80.76.155.25

Spam header sample:

From bounceX@canalplusnewsletter.com  Tue Oct 18 09:59:15 2011
Return-Path: <bounceX@canalplusnewsletter.com>
Received: from www.newslettercanalplus.com (t4c-webtv-se-vip.sth.basefarm.net [80.76.155.25])
by mail.atrotossavainen.fi (Postfix) with SMTP id 60041794B94
for <x@atro.fi>; Tue, 18 Oct 2011 09:59:15 +0300 (EEST)
From: CANAL+ <info@canalplus.fi>
To: "x <x@atro.fi>
Message-ID: <ef793c2b7cb1408285dd5bd480e183c4@canalplusnewsletter.com>
Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2011 08:58:43 +0200
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?B?Q0FOQUwrIEpVTEtJU1RJIErExEtJRUtLT1ZBTElOVEFOU0Eg?=
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Length: 14549
Lines: 316

Spam envelope-from lines and dates for all captured messages

The digit sequence after “bounce” and before “@” is always different.

From bounceX@canalplusnewsletter.com  Thu Apr  1 16:54:03 2010
From bounceX@canalplusnewsletter.com  Fri Apr  9 16:25:55 2010
From bounceX@canalplusnewsletter.com  Fri Apr 23 19:14:54 2010
From bounceX@canalplusnewsletter.com  Fri May  7 13:15:04 2010
From bounceX@canalplusnewsletter.com  Fri May 21 14:00:08 2010
From bounceX@canalplusnewsletter.com  Fri Jun  4 16:32:38 2010
From bounceX@canalplusnewsletter.com  Fri Aug 27 18:41:27 2010
From bounceX@canalplusnewsletter.com  Fri Sep 10 19:53:40 2010
From bounceX@canalplusnewsletter.com  Thu Oct  7 20:00:12 2010
From bounceX@canalplusnewsletter.com  Fri Oct 15 15:36:07 2010
From bounceX@canalplusnewsletter.com  Fri Oct 29 18:12:39 2010
From bounceX@canalplusnewsletter.com  Tue Nov 30 21:35:22 2010
From bounceX@canalplusnewsletter.com  Fri Feb  4 18:21:02 2011
From bounceX@canalplusnewsletter.com  Fri Feb 18 12:34:31 2011
From bounceX@canalplusnewsletter.com  Thu Apr 14 14:17:29 2011
From bounceX@canalplusnewsletter.com  Thu Apr 21 15:27:10 2011
From bounceX@canalplusnewsletter.com  Thu Apr 28 18:43:03 2011
From bounceX@canalplusnewsletter.com  Wed May 25 12:48:22 2011
From bounceX@canalplusnewsletter.com  Mon Jun 20 20:16:14 2011
From bounceX@canalplusnewsletter.com  Tue Jul  5 15:32:43 2011
From bounceX@canalplusnewsletter.com  Thu Aug 11 14:53:41 2011
From bounceX@canalplusnewsletter.com  Tue Aug 30 11:19:34 2011
From bounceX@canalplusnewsletter.com  Wed Sep 28 11:07:21 2011
From bounceX@canalplusnewsletter.com  Tue Oct 18 09:59:15 2011

4 Responses to (RESOLVED) Canal Plus newsletter: no bounce processing, not respecting opt-out, not responding to complaints

  1. InfiniteMho
    November 5, 2011 at 12:13 pm

    More.

    Received: from www.newslettercanalplus.com (t4c-webtv-se-vip.sth.basefarm.net [80.76.155.25])
    by mail.atrotossavainen.fi (Postfix) with SMTP id 24C02794FEE
    for <x@atro.fi>; Fri, 4 Nov 2011 11:10:33 +0200 (EET)

  2. InfiniteMho
    November 9, 2011 at 12:18 pm

    And more, in a separate post to give it an appearance on the top of the list.

  3. JUNE
    December 16, 2011 at 4:10 pm

    As technical providers for the newsletter solution that our client is using for the distribution of their newsletters we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you personally and your business.

    We do not answer for our client who monitors the info@canalplus.fi address or the hosting company monitoring abuse@basefarm.net address. However we do answer to the correspondence to the postmaster@canalplusnewsletter.com and abuse@canalplusnewsletter.com addresses.

    For some reason the postmaster address was not setup correctly so we didn’t receive your communication until you contacted us using the abuse address. Again, we offer you our sincere apologies.

    As we are now alerted to the issue at hand we have taken the following actions:

    1. We have removed all addresses using the atro.fi domain from our client’s distribution lists.
    2. We have corrected the postmaster@canalplus.fi address issue.

    Due to client policy we do not remove bounce addresses on a regular basis from our distribution lists although doing so might have avoided this unfortunate situation. We do however encourage opt out through our clients newsletter and hope to handle these kinds of situations by direct communication through our clients customer service department. Again, our apologies for this process having failed in this regard.

    Hopefully, you will no longer receive any unwanted communication from canalplus.fi in the future.

    Best wishes,
    June

    • InfiniteMho
      December 16, 2011 at 5:38 pm

      Thanks, “June”, or Johan, and thanks for your private email responses of Nov 10 and Nov 15. I’ve marked this post as RESOLVED now.

      “Due to client policy we do not remove bounce addresses on a regular basis”. Whoa there! I think that’s a poor client policy. In fact, I think it’s beyond poor. Removing undeliverables is Mailing List Management 101 material.

      I’m generally speaking not interested in opting out through links in the client’s marketing material. Why? Because I am not the person who subscribed, and because I have no way to tell if the list has one or 100 subscriptions from that domain. I’m not going to do this piecemeal; I’m going to tell you the domain changed hands, and the owner of the file of personal data then has a Data Protection Directive related obligation not to process erroneous or outdated personal data. I’ve already told you that in our private conversation.

      But as said; thanks for addressing the matter, and thanks for sorting it out.

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