The best email notifications for Twitter

Have you noticed that Twitter recently unveiled new email notifications for mentions, retweets, and favorites? We think this is really exciting and just launched our own super-charged versions of these notifications! Check out these examples and, if you haven't already, read below to learn how you can start receiving our enhanced notifications.

The new Mentions Notification

Our Mentions Alert has always been a popular feature. Now that Twitter has its own Mentions Notification, we decided to take the feature to the next level. Our version of the Mentions Notification will display the extended conversation history (in other words, the full chain of replies) and allows you to reply and retweet directly from your inbox!

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Remember, you can still create a standard Mentions Alert if you don't want to receive an email for every single mention. That's right - tweetymail's Mentions Alert will allow you to collect multiple mentions into a single email.

Retweet and Favorite Notification

We've also enhanced the new Retweet and Favorite Notifications with features you won't find anywhere else. Here is an example of the new Retweet Notification:

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How to Receive tweetymail Notifications

It is really easy to set up our notifications. You can try them for free with a new tweetymail account, and continue receiving them by subscribing to FULL or MAX access:

  • Sign up or sign in to your tweetymail account
  • Click on the Notifications tab
  • Copy the notification email address displayed on that tab
  • Go to your Twitter account settings
  • Change the email address in your Twitter settings to the one provided by tweetymail

tweetymail will intercept the email that Twitter normally sends to you and will immediately send you a an enhanced notification instead. tweetymail will also make sure to send you any other email it receives at that address.

Give it a try and see how it works! It's really easy to set up, works really fast, and is incredibly convenient.

New schedule options for email alerts

We're excited to announce that we just added some new options that allow you to receive your Twitter timeline and other tweets whenever you want them. You can now choose to receive your email alerts according to the following schedules:

  • After a minimum number of new tweets
  • Hourly
  • Daily
  • At specific times during the day

These new schedule options are available for Timeline Alerts (formerly known as 'Tweets Alerts') and List Alerts. To configure one of the new schedule options, simply sign in to your tweetymail account and either create a new alert or modify an existing alert.

Timeline
Enjoy!

Sender verification issues with Yahoo Mail resolved

If you're a Yahoo Mail user and have experienced the dreaded  "sender verification" error when sending emails to tweetymail, we have good news for you: the problem is fixed!

Some time ago, something changed in the configuration of the Yahoo Mail servers that started causing sender verification to fail for certain users. Unfortunately, we were unaware
of the problem for a long time (quick note: feel free to nag us if you see issues like this!). We recently took some time to investigate the problem and came up with a solution.

If you previously disabled sender verification due to this issue with your Yahoo email address, we strongly encourage you to re-enable the setting in your tweetymail account. Let us know if you experience any other issues.

Shorten links with goo.gl

Many of you have requested the option to shorten links using the Google URL Shortener (goo.gl). Good news - Google finally released an API for goo.gl and we've added at it to tweetymail!

To shorten your links using goo.gl:
  1. Sign in to your tweetymail account
  2. On the Email Addresses tab, click on General Settings
  3. Under the URL Shortener section, select one of the two goo.gl options (depending on whether or not you have your own API key)
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Enjoy!

Automation of follow requests and new limits

We've recently noticed increased abuse of the "follow" feature to automatically follow large numbers of users. We want to remind you that Twitter has the following rule regarding auto-following:

The only auto-following behavior Twitter allows is auto-follow-back (following a user after they have followed you). Automated un-following is also not permitted.

Please be sure to read Twitter's automation rules and Twitter's following rules to learn more.

On a related note, we've decided to instate new usage limits for follow / unfollow / blocks requests to help prevent abuse. The limits are as follows:
  • FREE access - 20 requests per month
  • FULL access - 200 requests per month
  • MAX access - unlimited requests
Please note that, regardless of usage limits, abuse is not tolerated and will lead to account suspension. You can view your monthly usage at any time by signing in to your tweetymail account and viewing the Account Details tab.

Please feel free to comment below if you have any questions.

A more informative email subject line

Based on feedback from our fantastic users, we just added two new settings that control how information is displayed in the subject line of our emails. We've been experimenting with these settings over the past day (as you might have noticed!) and now want to tell you more about them.

New setting #1: Display the number of tweets in the subject line

This setting provides a simple but very useful way to know how much information is in an email without having to open it. This setting is now enabled by default.

New setting #2: Display the timestamp of the email in the subject line

Although most email clients already display the timestamp of the email, some users asked to see this information in the subject line. Perhaps more importantly, users have asked us if we can prevent email clients such as Gmail from grouping messages together. Enabling this setting is the way to do it! The setting is not enabled by default, and if you decide to use it, please be sure that you have configured your timezone correctly in your Twitter settings.

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So how do you turn these settings on or off?

  1. Sign in to your tweetymail account
  2. Click on General Settings on the Email Addresses tab
  3. Check or uncheck the boxes and click Save Settings
Settings

Tell us what you think! Do you find these settings useful? Did we get the defaults right?

Get multiple mentions in a single email

The tweetymail Mentions Alert is a great way to keep up with conversations on Twitter. Create this alert and tweetymail will automatically send you an email when a new tweet mentions your username. FULL/MAX access users can even reply to mentions directly from their inbox.

The Mentions Alert was originally designed to send you an email for every new mention so that you could receive the mention as soon as possible. However, we underestimated how popular some of you are! That's why we recently added a "Mentions Threshold" option to the alert. You can now a specify a threshold number and tweetymail will wait for that number of mentions to accumulate before sending you an email. All of your new mentions will be listed in that single email.

To increase your Mentions Threshold, simply sign in to your tweetymail account, navigate to the Alerts tab, and click on "settings" for your Mentions Alert. Enjoy!

Mentions

More retweet goodness in your email

As you hopefully know, we recently added the ability to generate "new style" retweets directly from your email. Today we are updating all of our emails to fully support "new style" retweets. Here is what that means:
  • We now display the original tweet along with the name of the person who retweeted it (see screenshot below)
  • Replying to a retweet will create a reply email to the author of the original tweet
  • Replying "all" to a retweet will create a reply email to the original author, the person who retweeted it, and anyone else mentioned in the tweet
  • Retweeting will retweet the original tweet as long as you do not add a comment or modify the tweet (see our smart retweets post)
  • Mentions alerts now include retweets
Here is an example "latest" email containing tweets from @Scobleizer:

Retweets

Leave us a comment below if you have any questions!

Even better direct message emails

If you've set up your Twitter account to receive tweetymail's enhanced Twitter notifications, then you already know how easy it is to respond to direct messages directly from your email. Today we added a few tweaks to make those Direct Message Notifications even more useful:
  • Profile picture: You can now see the profile picture of the user who sent you the message
  • Message history: You can now see the previous direct message that you sent to that same user
Here's what it looks like:

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Although Twitter does not technically keep track of "replies" when it comes to direct messages, we hope that the message history feature will make it easier to keep up with direct message conversations. Let us know what you think!

Tweet, reply, and retweet without worrying about 140

If you've ever sent a tweet, reply, or retweet over 140 characters (don't worry - it happens to the best of us), you know that tweetymail will respond back with an email letting you know. The easiest thing to do in that case is to click the "post the full text" link in the email and re-send to post@tweetymail.com. However, if you find yourself going over 140 characters often then you might feel like this is one step too many. That's why we've added a new option that allows you to tweet, reply, and retweet without ever having to worry about the 140 character limit. Simply enable this setting and tweetymail will automatically post the full text any time the text is too long. It works exactly like re-sending to post@tweetymail.com, but without the extra step.

To enable this new setting:

  • Sign in to your tweetymail account
  • Click on "General Settings" on the Email Addresses tab in your account
  • Scroll down to the "Tweeting over 140 Characters" section and check the box
  • Save the settings
Settings

Please note that this setting is only available to FULL/MAX users.

Special thanks to @brucewagner for suggesting this feature!