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.
If you choose to turn off this setting and you want to find out who has started following you, there are a couple of ways to do this. Neither of these options are great, so if you’re aware of a better way of doing this, let us know and we’ll update 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. On top of that, the list is not sorted in any meaningful way and there is no way to multi-select people and “bulk follow” them.
2) 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.
