Inspired by Fantomaster’s… “Do NOT tweet your e-mail address openly if you don’t want to get spammed to hell and back!”
Objective
a) If I tweet a new email address onto the public timeline, will it get picked up as per Fantomaster’s warning?
- Set up a new Gmail – archibold.teriyaki@googlemail.com
- Tweet that email address once from an established account
- Log into Gmail a while later and check if I’ve got any spam email
Simples, eh?
The Test
Tweeted 19:22 10th July 2009 from @Lindop
this is a test: archibold.teriyaki@googlemail.com
Results
1st August 2009
I’m quite surprised. Just one spam email, basically a $15 get-rich-quick Twitter ebook.
From: Sheldon Washington
To: aquintano@gmail.com (note ArchiboldT has been BCC’d)
Date: 17 July 2009 17:29
Subject: Fw: connect with twitter
Hi,
Jamie is here,
Are you struggling to build a decent targeted list of subscribers while others do it quickly with ease?
Apply instantly here:http://bloat.me/7mtM
Conclusion
Fantomaster is right, tweeting your email address will get you some spam.
However, it’s worth considering the method that bots use to harvest email address… do they have to be following you, or can they just scrape the indexed public timeline? I’m inclined to go with the second one for two reasons.
a) I used my own Twitter account to tweet the email address, and with just 165 followers I don’t think it’s a scalable approach for these scrapers to follow accounts first.
b) The email was sent on 17th July – 5 days after I tweeted. A time-lag doesn’t make sense. Most automated systems that rely on following people will pick up new email addresses immediately and fire out a spam email within the hour.
What can we take away from all this?
Well I guess take Fantomaster’s advice and don’t tweet your email address unless you’ve got a good spam filter. It’s just like putting a mailto: link on your website, an open invitation to send you spam emails.
Tags: fantomaster, spam, twitter
August 5th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
also, gmail’s spam filter is pretty good. Im pretty sure they caught some… i think another way to test this is to test it on an xyzd.com domain you own but dont use, create an email address archibold.teriyaki@xyzd.com and within your hosting company for the xyzd.com site remove the spam filter….
…just a thought.
August 6th, 2009 at 2:55 am
The email that I received did actually get caught by Gmail’s spam filter, but it was the only one. Another thing worth remembering is that Gmail’s spam folder deletes everything after 30 days, but the test ran from 10 July – 1 Aug.
August 13th, 2009 at 5:12 am
Okay, so last night I made this mistake and put out my e-mail because I wanted someone to send me something. As soon as I did that, I got about 3-4 spam e-mails. Went to bed, woke up this morning and half of my inbox was spam from people that obviously got it from Twitter. I deleted the post from my Twitter page but it is not deleted from the server since I can still find it if I search.
Are you telling me that eventually the spammers or spam bots or whatever is used will not be able to find my e-mail anymore or am I going to always get spam and be forced to make a new e-mail?
I see you put “@googlemail.com” as your e-mail as opposed to “@gmail.com” — do you think that made a big difference? I don’t see anyone really giving their e-mail as @googlemail.com. I bet you’d see different results if you put @gmail.com.
Let me know please I really want to figure this out. I don’t want to make a new e-mail if I don’t need to.
August 13th, 2009 at 5:54 am
@TheXFrame Sorry to hear that and thanks for sharing.
The truth is that most email addresses will find their way onto databases sooner or later (I worked in email marketing many years ago!). Spam filters are much better than they used to be and Gmail has one of the best in my opinion.
Once your email address has been scraped it will probably always be spammed. It’s unfortunate but unavoidable. Your best bet is to install some decent spam filter (if you’re using a private email solution) or use a well-known provider like Gmail.
Using @googlemail.com instead of @gmail.com won’t make any difference – the scrapers are likely programmed to look for anything that matches @. and add it to their database.