A week ago, without any prior notice, Twitter changed their backend resulting in removing headers from their emails which we used to provide you the Topify service. Once I discovered about this change, I asked on their official developers support forum about it and twice sent a mention to @TwitterAPI account. All of these were unanswered until today. Today they finally posted a clarification:

Many of the emails we send have X-Twitter* headers in them, with pieces of information about the event which triggered them. You might have noticed we've started decommissioning these headers.

If for some reason you were using these headers programmatically in order to detect / process events, you should stop doing it and switch to one of the means supported by the API. For example, the Streaming API. Please let us know if you needed help or if you had questions!

(from: https://dev.twitter.com/discussions/708)

I considered switching to using the Streaming API in the past, but the only option for Topify is to use the Site Streams version of it. But Site Streams are still in beta, and according to the documentation there is no estimated date for it to exit beta. Considering this last episode and other actions by Twitter in the past year, I have no desire to expriment with their beta offerings. Not only this can result in unstable service for you, they might just shut it down one day.

Topify was conceived as a response to long frustration with useless emails. Emails that you couldn’t process from your inbox, emails that had very frustrating mobile experience. Topify was sort of experiment, to see if it can be done better. Judging by your response and adoption, the experiment was successful. 

What do you need to do? Go to your Twitter settings page: https://twitter.com/settings/account and change the email address there to your own email address.

I would like to use the opportunity and thank Nicolas Toper from CritSend. Nicolas helped me since the beginning both by providing Topify a reliable deliverability solution for emails and by the helpful advices he gave along the way. I also would like to thank you, our users. You made all of these into a very fun and rewarding experience.

If you have any comments feel free to leave them here, email me personally: arik@arikfr.com or tweet (@arikfr).

Thank you !

Arik Fraimovich (@arikfr)

As many of your already noticed, you no longer receive our email notifications but the regular Twitter notifications. This is due to a technical change that Twitter made in their email notifications, which results in us unable to determine the type of message.

While it is possible to determine the type of notification from the message text, we prefer not to do that as it's usually unstable (anytime Twitter will change thier email text wording can result in issues). We're looking into options as to what should we do, but currently you will receive Twitter's regular emails.

Please note that:

1. You can't reply to these notifications.

2. If you forward us your notifications from Gmail, please disable this rule because we no longer able to determine who to send it back to.

If you have any further questions, feel free to leave a comment here, ask on Twitter (@Topify) or by email (help @ topify.com).

Thanks.

What Happened?

Login to Twitter.com and in case you see the following message:

If you haven’t been receiving notifications from us in the last few days, you better visit Twitter’s web version and verify that you don’t see the above message. If you do see it, please choose the option to “try sending message to your email address again”.

To those of you who are curious why do you even see this message — well, a few days ago our hosting provider had an hour outage due to network failure. If Twitter tried sending you a notification at this time, it would appear to them as if your email address isn’t working.

Obviously, we’re taking measures to make sure that this won’t happen again.

It appears that it wasn’t our fault at all — one of Twitter’s email sending servers was marked for spam, and therefore our servers were rejecting it. We have now whitelisted that server and it shouldn’t (hopefully) happen again.

Thank you for your understanding.

Starting from today (August 16th, 2010) Twitter will start deprecating “Basic Auth” (3rd party applications authentication with plain username & password) and will start moving all 3rd party applications to OAuth.

What it means for you is that you need to verify that your Topify account is OAuth enabled. To do that, just visit our OAuth page. (if you never provided us your Twitter account password, most chances are that you are already OAuth enabled)

Switching to OAuth has many benefits with more security and control for you is the biggest one of them. Once you enable OAuth on your Topify account, we will no longer store your password. Another benefit is that you can always revoke our access from the connections settings page on Twitter, if you need to.

Please let us know if you need any help with this process.

You asked for it, and we heard you - we removed the need to confirm the actions you do via the links in the notifications. We added the secondary confirmation only to the users who actually need it.

Enjoy :)

As some of you already noticed, when you click on a link to follow/block/mark as spam a user, you will have to confirm this action on the opening web page:

The reason we added this extra step is because of some users had antivirus software that were scanning their emails and checking the links in them. When those antivirus programs were visiting the links, they were causing the different actions to be taken. We couldn’t filter out the different antivirus programs, because they disguise themselves as normal users, therefore we had to add this extra step.

We would love to hear your ideas on how to deal with this without the extra step, but for now we will have to keep the extra step. 

Topify has been in private beta for too long now and it’s time to move on. So far we were financing Topify from our own pockets. But in order to make Topify available for everyone, it will have to generate some revenue (at least to cover its costs), and therefore it’s time to introduce some premium features.

Like many others in our industry, we thought about going freemium. What we had in mind is offering the current service as the free version and have premium versions (with the features you’ve been requesting for so long) for some price:

(creating tables in Tumblr is a pain, you can find a text version of this table here)

(clarification: all accounts will have DM notifications like today. By “Fast DM delivery” we mean that premium users will get their notifications faster)

This is just our first thoughts on this. The features list was compiled based on your feedback so far. The prices are made up from thin air, it just numbers that seemed right. They probably will change and we might add some other options.

The reason that we post this so early on, is to hear what you think. What we have in mind doesn’t really matter — it’s what you have in mind that matters most. Because if no one is interested in the premium features, we better think of something else :)

So what do you think about this? Would you be willing to pay for Topify premium?

UPDATE: Twitter are in contact with SpamCop to resolve this issue. Meanwhile we whitelisted their servers on ours. Please make sure that you email address wasn’t flagged as inactive (and if it was, please follow the instructions below).

UPDATE 2: We updated the instructions on how to fix this, if your account was affected.

Today some of Twitter mail servers were marked as sending spam by SpamCop:

128.121.146.153 listed in bl.spamcop.net (127.0.0.2)

If there are no reports of ongoing objectionable email from this system it will be delisted automatically in approximately 14 hours.

Causes of listing

• System has sent mail to SpamCop spam traps in the past week (spam traps are secret, no reports or evidence are provided by SpamCop)
• SpamCop users have reported system as a source of spam about 10 times in the past week

I’m not sure how this happened, but it is. This causes our servers to filter messages sent from the marked servers. We notified Twitter of this situation and we hope that they will address it soon.

But the problem is that besides that some messages will be lost, because of how Twitter mail system works, if it can’t deliver message to an address for a few times it marks it as non working and gives the user the following message:

If you received this message on your account, please do the following to make Twitter send you notifications again:

1. Don’t panic :)
2. Click on the link that says “click here to try sending messages to your email address again”.
3. If this doesn’t help, please contact us by email - <help@topify.com>.

If SpamCop doesn’t whitelist Twitter soon, we will do it ourselves. But we keep this as a last resort option, so we won’t expose you to spam.

To keep updated on how this resolves, please follow us on Twitter - @topify, if you haven’t done so yet.

1 hour ago Twitter made their new spam reporting method available to us developers as part of their API. As of 15 minutes ago, when you report someone for spam from Topify, it’s the same as reporting from Twitter’s UI. So in case you were wondering - you continue doing the same action you’ve been doing until now from Topify, and we take care for the details.

We also changed the text on our notifications from “Block & Report” to “Report For Spam”, to be consistent with Twitter.

Hopefully this is one step closer to cleaning Twitter from spam.