Twimailer is a nifty service. When someone follows you on Twitter, Twimailer sends you an email that has more info than what Twitter sends you, including how many people are following that person, and their recent tweets -- all helpful for you to decide if you might be interested in following that person.

However, Twimailer says that to use their service, you have to change your email in your Twitter account to point to them. As many have pointed out, even if you trust Twimailer, it's not really a secure practice. After all, password resets go to the email address of record.

Chris Messina has posted a way to use Twimailer securely using GMail. If you use Gmail, check out Chris' post.

However, if you use a desktop application for your email, and use an email service aside from Gmail, you still can use Twimailer securely. I'm going to use Mail.app as the example here, but this can be done in just about any desktop mail app -- any that can do "redirect" on a message from filters or rules.

  1. The first part is the same: Sign up for Twimailer, as Chris explains:
    To get started, they just need an email address to send your notifications to. Twimailer will assign you a unique email address like twitter1234567@twimailer.com. Set this aside (copy it to TextEdit or something).

    Don't follow their instructions in their howto video.

  2. Next, go to your email program and find an email message from Twitter with the subject line saying that someone "is now following you on Twitter!". In Mail.app, open up Preferences and select Rules. Click on "Add Rule".
  3. In the window that pops up, filter so that any message that "Contains" in the "From" field something like twitter-follow-youremailaddress=example.com@postmaster.twitter.com is where the rule is enabled. (The "youremailaddress=example.com" snippet is how Twitter references your email address at youremailaddress@example.com.)
  4. In the lower area, "Perform the following actions:", change the action to "Redirect Message" to the email address Twimailer gave you. You might also have the Rules system stop processing that message. In the end, your rule might look something like this:
    Twimailer rule
  5. Optionally you could have the original Twitter email deleted or moved to another folder.

That's it, that's all. The workflow may be different in different email apps, but the redirect function is the key.

As Chris says:

It seems to me that this kind of feature improvement is something that Twitter should really do itself, but of course it’s great to see someone from the community pitch in and add incremental value until Twitter gets around to it.

At the same time, putting Twimailer in between you and Twitter’s password recovery mechanism seems unnecessarily dangerous (i.e. Twimailer could go down, get hacked, sold or might be simply be implemented insecurely (consider Spotify’s recent security breach)). I actually have no insight into these things about Twimailer, but I’d rather not take any unnecessary chances.

I welcome comments about how this works for you in Mail.app or in other mail programs.