How Spammers use Twitter to get your email and how you can avoid them?

Spammers are using Twitter to harvest your email address. Using Twitter, they can gather as many as 3 email address per minute and they can then use these email address for doing their dirty business. This spamming trick was first brought to notice by Chris Crum where he revealed that the spammers are using Twitter to harvest emails and do their product promotion.

How Spammers use Twitter to get emails?

Well, this is very simple. A simple query on Twitter search can bring in loads of email addresses which can be then used for dirty jobs. Here is a screenshot of what I meant:

Similarly, a spammer can write a script to gather email addresses and can then sit back to get several hundred thousand email addresses over a few weeks.

How can you avoid such Twitter spammers?

The easiest way to avoid such spammers is to not throw your email addresses in your tweets. In case you would like to share it with a fellow tweeple, just send it via Direct Message. Using Scr.im for hiding your email in a URL is another cool way to avoid this threat.

Tagged as: twitter