#d-fence

[queenofchaosworld]

[craftramsay]

D - 🤺 D - 🤺 D - 🤺

...How is there no “picket fence” emoji?

[suomispam]

D-Fence gone black hat, and cartooney

D-Fence is a fairly old Finnish spam filtering company. They have provided filtering MX service for years for deploying in front of regular mail servers. Last year they started to migrate to new areas of business and attempted to monetize on the GDPR. Unfortunately they partnered with vine.eu to advertise their new service using spam. I.e. a spam filtering company chooses to use spam for their own marketing. Just because you sell spam filtering services does not give you a free pass to send your own spam, and they of all people should know this. Also just because you have two products and you only try to sell one of those with spam does not get you a free pass.

D-Fence has publicly admitted to buying business contacts (and we would guess email addresses) from Asiakastieto as well as collecting them from other sources. Vine is also known to sell address lists so we do not reliably know who sold them the address lists they actually use. Buying 3rd party address lists and/or harvesting them from other sources is by definition spam. There is no way they could have permission from the recipients of their marketing emails.

Their spam campaigns landed them listings on both Suomispam and Spamhaus lists. Apparently they did not consider getting listed as a sign that they really should reconsider their business methods. Instead they have threatened to file criminal complaints against Suomispam with made up reasons. It has already been established that Suomispam is perfectly legal, but D-Fence apparently feels it is in their interest to try to shut Suomispam down with bogus charges anyways.

It is sad that it has come to this but our recommendation is for any remaining D-Fence customers to migrate their spam filtering services to some other white hat service providers.

[bandilight]

védekezz!