Wincore Web Solutions

Twitter, the social networking site, in many ways defies description. It's been referred to as a micro blogging site and a community IM (Instant Messaging) tool. Take note of the word "community" - with Twitter you post "tweets" that are up to 140 characters in length, and by default, unless you've protected your twitter account, are visible to everyone on the internet.

Everyone.

Many people using Twitter will include their email address in a tweet - perhaps letting others know how to reach them to continue a conversation or send a message that just doesn't fit in 140 characters. Unfortunately including your email address in a tweet is a very bad idea. The reason is a very simple and age-old (in internet terms) problem: spam.

By default, everyone can see your all tweets. This is one of the driving forces behind Twitter - making posts visible to anyone. Unfortunately, that includes spammers.

Much like spammers harvest email addresses from web pages, they've begun harvesting from Twitter tweets as well. In fact, every tweet is available as a web page itself, so the spammers don't really even have to do that much additional work; they just scan Twitter - web pages or feeds - for anything that looks like an email address. Once they find one they add it to their database of email addresses to spam.

Even if your Twitter account is "protected" (only people who you approve can see your tweets directly) you're still at risk. The practice of "retweeting", or essentially reposting your original tweet, can make your information visible to everyone once again.

You can see this all for yourself: go to http://search.twitter.com and search for "@hotmail.com". All the recent tweets that include "@hotmail.com" will be displayed. Many, if not most of these will be Hotmail email addresses. Even if simply obscured by a dash or other simple separator between the email name and @hotmail.com, a small piece of software that scans, corrects and collects these email addresses is a goldmine for spammers.

The solution is simple: don't include your