LiveJournal comment notifications

Postings in news have been a bit cagey about what's going on with comment notification emails. They've mentioned that there's a "third party" involved. It turns out that LiveJournal have got themselves blacklisted by the Spamhaus Block List for providing spam support services, in this case, hosting websites for spammers.

This is why comment notifications aren't getting through: the SBL is a widely respected and widely used email blacklist. They're not saying LJ are spammers or indeed sending spam email, they are saying that LJ aren't taking down journals set up by spammers, so they're effectively helping the spammers to spam. Most email spam directs the mark to a website, so providing those websites is a serious matter to Spamhaus.

This is worrying: it means LJ probably aren't responding to complaints about hosting the spammers' sites. I think Spamhaus would have tried sending email to abuse@lj, though possibly not under their own names, as you want to be sure that reports from ordinary users are handled correctly, same way as restaurant reviewers don't book saying "I'm Jones from the Times". The detailed information from Spamhaus lists a huge number of spammy journals, and at least a couple of them were still there when I tried them. This doesn't bode well for LJ's future, to my mind.

livredor brought this to my attention. There's a thread on a news posting discussing the problem. azurelunatic (who is head of anti-spam for Dreamwidth) has more here, and I've commented on their posting.