One of the most annoying things about Twitter is auto direct messages. Someone follows you, you follow back out of courtesy, and in return you get an automated message from that person thanking you for following them. Multiply this by 10 or 20 new followers each day, and a new form of spam is born. I must confess that shortly after I joined Twitter I signed up at TweetLaterand I enabled an auto DM to anyone who followed me. However, once I started using Twitter I realised how much of an annoyance this is and I disabled it on my account. Because of automated DM’s I started ignoring all DM’s.
Fortunately, it’s possible to disable most automated direct messages. Most automated messages comes from two service providers: SocialToo and TweetLater To opt out of automated DM’s from TweetLater, just visit their opt out Twitter account and follow the instructions.
1. Follow @optmemout
2. Wait for the follow back
3. Send @optmeout any DM
4. Unfollow @optmeout
To opt out of SocialToo:
1. Visit www.socialtoo.com
2. Register for an account, filling in your Twitter account details
3. Once logged in, click on the Preferences tab at the top right corner of the window.
4. Enable the option “Turn off automatic Direct Messages from other users”
Since I’ve completed these steps, I’ve seen a drastic reduction in the number of automated direct messages. A few still comes through, but it’s not nearly as spammy as it was before.
#1 by Deems at June 17th, 2009
The easiest way to stop most of the unwanted DM spam is to not follow everyone who follows you. Why would you unless you’ve spent 5 minutes looking at their profile and their previous tweets and quickly enough assess whether or not they have something worthwhile to say.
#2 by Johann at June 17th, 2009
@Deems: Yeah I hear what you’re saying, but even people I want to follow sometimes have auto DMs. Auto following is not much of a problem for me, as I just use TweetDeck to filter out the messages I want to see.