Anti-Spam Settings/Tools

If you feel like you’re being bombarded by ‘New Follower’ emails and @ replies from Twitter Spammers, there are a couple of settings that you can change to reduce the noise levels. You should be aware that there are some drawbacks to changing these settings.

Both of the settings are under the Notices option on the Settings page.

Disabling New Follower Email

If you’re tired of receiving ‘New Follower’ emails from people / businesses, you can un-check the ‘New Followers Emails’ checkbox. The New Follower email lets you know that someone new has started following you on Twitter. This has been the email that most people are complaining about when they talk about Twitter Spam.

Keep in mind that disabling this email means that you will not be notified of any new followers, including people who you don’t consider to be spammers. So if someone starts to follow you, you’ll be unaware of that unless you go through the steps described below. And remember, this doesn’t stop the spammer from following you – it just eliminates the email alert.  Before turning off the New Follower email, you should consider signing up for Topify.  They provide an enhanced version of the New Follower email with additional information (Bio, Profile URL, Following/Followers ratio, recent tweets, etc.), making it easier to identify spammers just by looking at the email.

If you don’t want to turn off the New Follower email, you might want to consider setting up a filter on your email service to automatically re-direct these emails to a folder – e.g. a Bacn folder. This way you aren’t interrupted each time a New Follower email comes in. Just check your Bacn folder every now and then and process your New Follower emails in bulk.

For example, here’s a Gmail filter for directing New Follower notifications to a folder called _Bacn.

If you choose to completely turn off the New Follower email notifications and you want to find out who has started following you, there are a few ways to do this.

1) Go to your Followers page . If you are not following someone, you will see two options – follow and block, like this.

If you want to follow them too, just click the ‘follow’ function. If the new Follower is a Twitter Spammer, click the ‘block’ function. This process can be time consuming, especially if you have a large number of Followers, because there is no easy way to filter down the list to only include people who you aren’t following yet. The list is organized with the latest Followers at the top of the list, which makes it easier to find people who have recently followed you.

2) Twerp Scan is a utility that scans through your list of Followers and flags people who are potential spammers. You have the ability to control the parameters that determine who is a spammer. For example, you might define the criteria as anyone who is following more than 1,000 people and has a Followers:Following ration of 1:10.

Note:
According to the Twerp Scan site, there is an API bug that is preventing Twerp Scan from working properly. It appears that the bug has been fixed but has not been deployed yet.

3) The Your Twitter Karma web site gives you a more convenient way to find people who are following you. It also has a handy ‘Bulk Follow’ function.

First, click the Whack! button.

Next, enter you Twitter User Name and Password.

It will take a minute or so to scan through your Twitter contacts. Once the list has been generated, select ‘Only Followers’ from the Show drop-down box at the top of the page.

Now you will see a list of the people who follow you but you are not following. If you want to follow someone, just fill in the checkbox and click the ‘Bulk Follow’ button at the bottom of the page. If you see Twitter Spammers in this list, and you want to block them, you will need to click on their profile photo and you will be taken to their Profile page where you can block them.

If you have a large number of people following you, you might run into some issues due to Twitter’s API limitations (there is a limitation of 100 API requests per hour).

4) My Tweeple is another utility for managing your Following / Follower relationships.