Twimailer is a nifty service that launched recently that makes Twitter BACN (“email that you want, just not right now“) more useful and informative (example).
The only problem is that it requires you to change your Twitter account email to point to an address provided by Twimailer — on the whole, not a big deal if you trust Twimailer, but in general bad practice. (Rod Begbie also pointed out that this prevents people from being able to find you by your email address).
Fortunately there is a better and more secure way to take advantage of Twimailer.
I’ll demonstrate in Gmail but really I’m just auto-forwarding new follower notifications from Twitter to your Twimailer address. That’s it.
- First, go ahead and sign up for a new Twimailer account. To get started, they just need an email address to send your notifications to. Twimailer will assign you a unique email address like
twitter1234567@twimailer.com. Set this aside (copy it to TextEdit or something). - Next, load up your Gmail inbox and search for “is now following you on Twitter!”. Open up one of the notifications from Twitter (the From email should be something like
twitter-follow-your.address=gmail.com@postmaster.twitter.com). In the right hand drop-down menu, pick “Filter messages like this“:
- You should then see an interface like this (click to enlarge):
Go ahead and test this search to make sure it’s working (presuming you haven’t deleted all your notifications). - If everything looks good, go ahead and click Next Step and at check off “Forward it to” and enter your Twimailer email address that you set aside in Step 1.
If you don’t want duplicate notifications from Twitter and Twimailer, you should also check off “Skip the Inbox” or “Delete it” (the message will still be forwarded).
My setup looks like this (click to enlarge):
- Bonus: to filter or create a label for Twimailer notices, use this search:
from:(notices@twimailer.com) OR to:(notices@twimailer.com).
That’s it!
It seems to me that this kind of feature improvement is something that Twitter should really do itself, but of course it’s great to see someone from the community pitch in and add incremental value until Twitter gets around to it.
At the same time, putting Twimailer in between you and Twitter’s password recovery mechanism seems unnecessarily dangerous (i.e. Twimailer could go down, get hacked, sold or might be simply be implemented insecurely (consider Spotify’s recent security breach)). I actually have no insight into these things about Twimailer, but I’d rather not take any unnecessary chances.
The approach that I described above should mitigate any risk with using Twimailer and keep you in direct control over your Twitter account.
Factory Joe 