Spammers May Have Another Trick in Twitter

By Chris Crum - Wed, 05/13/2009 - 01:48

A Cautionary Tale for Twitterers

There have been plenty of complaints about Twitter spam, but what about spam as a result of our own tweeting? We have come to expect our Twitter streams to contain plenty of marketing messages (and perhaps the occasional worm), but some users may be unknowingly contributing to the spam that they find in their email inboxes.

I was having a talk with Twellow's lead developer Matthew Daines, and he pointed out that a simple query on Twitter Search can return large numbers of email addresses that spammers could potentially exploit. Results for such a query might look something like this:

"You can sit and just watch the email addresses steadily trickle in," he noted. "I wouldn't doubt it if spammers are harvesting these."

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