Subject: AOL blocking LiveJournal.com, try two
From: Evan Martin <martine@danga.com>
To: postmaster@aol.com
Organization: Danga Interactive
Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2003 16:23:40 -0700
Hello,
I mailed you yesterday about a problem we’re having interoperating with AOL member pages. (I have included that text below.)
Since we haven’t heard back from you, we’ve instituted a temporary workaround. However, this is not a technically correct solution, nor will it work in all cases.
In technical terms: we rewrite URLs to AOL member pages to use FTP instead of HTTP so there is no Referer header sent.
Because we haven’t heard back from you, I can only hope that this problem was accidentally caused by some automated system process, and eventually you will be able to fix it. If there is anything more we can do to help speed that process, please let us know.
-- Evan from LiveJournal.com
Original mail follows:
Here at LiveJournal.com, we have just confirmed that you are blocking your users from using images from their AOL webpages on our site. We’ve also heard some (unverified) rumours you are also blocking email-- email that these users have asked to receive, and who contact our support when their email never comes.
In technical terms: I can confirm that you are giving 404s on valid images URLs when the Referer is LiveJournal (www.livejournal.com).
Is there something the matter?
Is there a technical contact I can speak with?
A phone number would be preferable, but the only phone number we could find was quite unhelpful.
--
Evan Martin
martine@danga.com
http://neugierig.org