Well, probably not. The spam problem on Twitter isn’t really that much of a problem, thanks to the clever way that following works. Still, it’s kind of creepy to have a robot start observing your tweets in order to calculate god-knows-what. I’m not the only person who wants to keep their updates public, yet doesn’t like going through and blocking newly-added lurkers.
So I built a little email processing script to handle the problem. Won’t you help me test it out? If you’re game, head to http://twitter.manifestdensity.net.
Like I said via twitter, I think this is a cool service. But your post reminded me that I’m not really clear on why I should care if some robots follow my twitter stream. It does seem creepy somehow, but it really doesn’t make a difference in my life whether Buy My Kidney follows me or not.
Might it make sense to just use your script to weed out the notification emails from spam accounts, rather than actually blocking them?
Well, that’s a fair point. And I suppose it accomplishes that by turning these notifications into an RSS feed. I can’t actually send through the successful notifications as email, unfortunately — I would hit my host’s mail rate limit very quickly.
But personally, I do think there’s merit to keeping your personal information from being broadcast to strangers (even if it’s still available to strangers). It might just be my own silly hangup, though.
Maybe I’m missing it but I’m only seeing one place on the Account Settings where you can change your email address. So if I change it to point to your service, won’t I be missing out on other emails – e.g. the Direct Message email alert?
Afraid so. You can set direct messages to be delivered by SMS, of course. But at the moment there’s no pass-through option for the service.