Stop Twitter Spam

Last week, Twitter board member Fred Wilson (A VC) wrote an interesting blog post about how Twitter was struggling with a large percentage of email notifications going to the Bulk Mail / Junk Folder. They’ve made some dramatic improvements using a service called Return Path (see this PDF for details). According to the PDF, Twitter has now achieved 100% deliverability at Windows Live Hotmail, increased their deliverability to Yahoo! email by 124%, and their overall deliverability to all domains to 90% on average.

First of all, this might explain why some people inexplicably claimed to have never seen spam on Twitter while many other people (myself included) have been complaining about the rising levels of spam on Twitter for months. If all of your New Follower emails are going straight to your Junk Mail folder then you will have a false perception that there are no spam problems on Twitter. Now that the New Follower emails are going through to more people, those people are finally experiencing the hell that is a New Follower email from an obvious spammer. Before I saw this white paper, I was surprised when I saw someone announce that they have received their first Twitter spam. This Return Path white paper provides a possible explanation for this.

Second, this is good news for spammers who, until recently, were not reaching the inboxes of many Yahoo and Hotmail email users. Now that more of the New Follower emails are going through, the spammers have an expanded audience. All the more reason for Twitter to improve their New Follower email notification and continue their purging of spam accounts.

By the way, whatever happened to Twitter suppressing New Follower emails from obvious spammers? In Late May, Twitter co-founder Eve Williams quietly acknowledged that they were not sending out the New Follower email if the new follower’s profile was a suspected spammer based on some secret formula. For a while I was seeing almost no spammy New Follower emails but a few weeks ago I started seeing these coming through again. It wouldn’t surprise me if they moved away from that policy because many people complained that this was a half-baked solution. The lack of a New Follower email didn’t stop the spammer from following you, so people had to resort to tools like Twerp Scan or My Tweeple to get rid of the followers that were silently following them.