How do we fight Twitter Spam?

At TweetLater.com we take Twitter spam very seriously, and we've implemented several measures to ensure that our system isn't abused by spammers.

With the scheduled Twitter tweets, you can only send public status updates, meaning only your followers will see those updates.

You cannot send @ replies, which prevents people from sending fabricated conversations. As we know, an @ reply is seen by the @name person, regardless of whether the person is following you or not. That's why we don't offer that functionality. The purpose of our service is to keep you in contact with your followers.

You cannot send direct messages, even to your followers. That prevents people from blasting out a direct message to all their followers. Many people have their DMs forwarded to their email systems. If we allowed the sending of DMs, it would have opened the door not only for Twitter spam, but also for email spam.

The maximum number of status updates that you can schedule per rolling 60 minute period is 12. That's a throttle that we found reasonable to allow regular updates without inundating your followers with scheduled messages.

With the auto follow and auto thank you notes features of our site, we implemented an architecture that minimizes the opportunity for Twitter spam.

If you unfollow someone, our system does NOT again automatically follow that person. Hence, if you found that you've auto-followed a spammer, simply unfollow the person and he will remain unfollowed.

As a best practice for sending out automated thank you notes, start off with sending public tweets until a few have appeared in your stream. That will tell you that you've got everything configured correctly.

Then, immediately switch to sending private direct messages. Having a large number of auto thank you notes constantly appearing in your stream will irritate some of your followers and they could see that as spam.

If you've selected to send auto thank you notes without auto-following, your only option is to send public tweets. That's a limitation imposed by the Twitter system. You cannot send direct messages to people that you're not following. If you don't auto-follow, you won't be a follower of the person, and hence cannot send a direct message to that person.

We're very open to suggestions with regards to additional anti-spam measures that we can implement.