Does Anyone Here Understand the Rules of Twitter?

My Twitter account was just suspended.  Fortunately it's not a big hoo-ha to get it back . . . you just have to tick some boxes saying you'll be a good girl (or boy) in future.  But it's the reason I was suspended that puzzles me.

The page . . . and yes, it is a 'one size fits all' page . . . said I had been suspended because I'd been following aggressively and there had been a large number of reports of my spamming.

Now first of all, I'd like to say I abhore spam.  However, it seems that Twitter's definition of spam is very different from what most of us might understand by that term.  According to Twitter, you are spamming:

• If you have followed a large amount of users in a short amount of time;
• If you have followed and unfollowed people in a short time period, particularly by automated means (aggressive follower churn);
• If you repeatedly follow and unfollow people, whether to build followers or to garner more attention for your profile;

all of which sounds, to me, identical to their definition of 'aggressive following'.  But spamming covers other actions as well - in fact, there's a long list - and one of these is:

• If your updates consist mainly of links, and not personal updates;

which is also troubling because I do post links in almost all my posts - they're to articles and news items that I think may be interesting or helpful and which, I believe, my followers are following me in order to see.  I hope that what Twitter means is just links without some text saying what it is . . . but it's not clear.

As far as the 'aggressive following is concerned',  my following habits have remained exactly the same for at least the past six or eight months and I've never been suspended before.  I always follow roughly the same number of people each time . . . and only every other day, never ever two days running.  So why now?

And what also puzzles me is who these large number of people who reported me are.  Because a very large proportion of those who I follow, follow me back - usually around 70 to 80 per cent.  And, although I guess quite a number will automatically follow back anyone who follows them, I'd like to think that a lot of those who follow me do so because I post links to interesting articles and news items.

So, yes, I'm quite offended to have had my account suspended for aggressive following and spamming.  Of course, one of the problems is that no one outside Twitter actually knows what aggressive following consists of.  The guidelines say  "if you don’t follow or un-follow hundreds of users in a single day, and you aren’t using automated methods of following users, you should be fine."  (Notice it says 'should' . . . not 'will be'.)  But how many hundreds is 'hundreds'?

One Twitter expert I know used to teach that you could follow up to three hundred a day for three days in a row.  And some bigwig at Twitter had assured him personally that it was OK to do this.  But I know someone who was suspended for following 200 two days in a row and then, once she was reinstated, two days later for following ten!

I find it difficult to understand what Twitter hopes to gain by being so vague.  It would, after all, be quite easy to say "You may not follow more than 200 people once every two days" or something of the sort.  Then we'd all know where we stood.  But, sadly, this seems to be the way things go online these days (if you've read the posts I wrote in January about Google adwords, you'll know what I'm referring to).  And I wonder whether ultimately it's just about power . . . knowing that they have a hold over so many people who are anxiously pussy-footing around, trying not to break rules that haven't been fully explained.  Sadly, we'll never know.

Have You Heard of URIBL?

Have you heard of URIBL? Well, maybe you have . . . but I hadn't until last week. It describes itself as "a real time URL blacklist served via DNS to identify unsolicited bulk and commercial email." And that's something, I imagine, that most of us would applaud. People can submit sites for inclusion on the list. This makes it harder for emails from that site or mentioning that site to get through spam filters.

However, I found out about URIBL not because I wanted to report a site . . . but because I discovered I was ON it!!! I was sending a newsletter from my autoresponder to my mailing list, telling them about my previous post on this blog: What do You Need to be a Successful Internet Marketer? When I'd finished writing it, I checked it and clicked the 'spam' button which tells you (based on a number of factors) how likely your email is to get through people's spam filters (bearing in mind, as I've moaned about before, that on Microsoft Outlook, even if you whitelist addresses, they can still get shoved into the spam folder).

Everything about my newsletter was fine . . . everything, that is, except for the fact that I was blacklisted by URIBL. This was the first I'd heard of URIBL. I had no idea what it was . . . and I was worried because, although it didn't seem to mean that my emails wouldn't get through, it reduced their chances. Now, unfortunately, the message about this on my autoresponder was in lower case, and I read it as URLBL. So when I tried Googling it, nothing came up. Not knowing quite what to do about it, I put it on one side until I could ask someone who might know the answer.So I continued with a piece of writing I was doing - and then went to www.tiny.cc to shorten a link I wanted to insert. (If you've never used Tiny, I'd recommend it - you put in your link, click a button, and your new link comes up. If you register (which is free), you can also keep a record of all your abbreviations, so that you can use them again.)

Well, as I say, I went on to Tiny to shorten a link to this blog. And a big red sign came up saying "Check terms and conditions". Which I did. And I found that Tiny won't shorten links to sites that are blacklisted on URIBL. Now it was getting serious! But at least I did now have the correct title of the site and was able to find it. I checked and, yes, I was on their list. Fortunately, it's fairly easy to ask to be removed - you put in your website url and explain why the listing is incorrect. I told them that I sent emails only to people who had given them to me through my opt-in box, that all my emails have an 'unsubscribe' link at the bottom, and that I had never sent an unsolicited email in my life.

I was taken off the list very quickly - although they didn't let me know; I had to go to the site and look. But it left me wondering how on earth they could think that a blog hosted by Blogger was capable of sending out bulk unsolicited email. So I had another look at the website and worked out what must have happened. Under 'List Information' it states: "URIBL lists domains that appear in spam, NOT where they were sent from." Which, to me, seems a very odd way of doing it.

So, why am I going on about this? Well,there is a lesson, I think, to be learned from it. I have to assume that someone on my mailing list received one of my emails in which I gave a link to my blog, and for some reason that person thought it was spam. And this could be because I've not been sending out emails very frequently . . . perhaps every ten days or so, which means it's quite easy for a recipient to forget that he or she actually signed up to the list.

When someone signs in to my opt-in box, to acquire the four books on internet marketing that I'm offering (have you got yours yet?), they are taken to a 'thank you' page where they're told that they will receive an email explaining how to download them, and they're given the address it will come from and asked to whitelist it. But, clearly, that's not enough. We obviously need to keep reminding them who we are - and, while not advocating sending an email a day, perhaps three a week might be best!

I'm left wondering how many sites get wrongly listed . . . and why a site can be blacklisted on a single complaint without, apparently, any investigation. At least they make it easy to get off again.

Microsoft Outlook is driving me bananas!!!

I’ve recently changed my computer and have Windows 7 installed, together with the latest version of Microsoft Outlook.  Windows 7 is OK (I was a Vista fan and there’s not too much difference).  But Microsoft Outlook is driving me bananas.  Although I have the junk mail filter turned off, it insists on shoving stuff into the junk folder.  This doesn't stop junk turning up in my inbox - well, I don't mind that - after all, how long does it take to click 'delete'?  But what I do object to is the legitimate emails that regularly turn up in the junk folder.

There's a company that sends me a daily email - I've requested it and I always read it, but it always goes into the junk folder.  And before you say 'why don't you add it to your white list?', I have - countless times.  It makes no difference at all.  This despite the statement that 'email from addresses or domain names on your safe senders list will never be treated as junk mail'.  Oh really?

And what on earth is it that makes the software categorise something as junk?  Today emails from Facebook and Paypal were treated as junk.  But the icing on the cake was when an email that I sent myself as a memo (from my own address to my own address) was treated as junk!

Perhaps if I turned on the junk filter, it would start shoving everything into the junk folder and then at least all my new emails would be in the same place.  Hmm . . . it's worth a try!