How to Stop the Auto DM Madness and Give Spammers the Finger

If you have a lot of Twitter  followers and they aren’t all actual friends, chances are that you get a fair amount of auto DMs, (direct messages) many of which are nothing but spam. Most of those DMs are sent using one of two services; either Social Oomph or SocialToo.

Now before you grab your pitch forks and torches, let me clarify here that there’s nothing wrong with either of those services and they both actually offer many very handy options. For example, I find SocialOomph’s “semi auto vetting” tool indispensable. Obviously they didn’t create a way for you to send auto DMs to your followers for bad, they created them for good. Unfortunately, bad people always find ways to use good things in bad ways. So, instead of sending a simple benign message like, “Thanks for following me, I look forward to reading your tweets”, the spammers use the service to send us links to stuff we probably don’t want or need, and often, even more devious than that, they use the DMs to send phishing URLs.

Fortunately, both of those services have provided a way for us to stop all the madness. They both have options that you can use to block auto DMs so that any time someone uses their services to send one, you won’t receive it. With SocialOomph this is done through @optmeout and you’ll find the instructions here. To use SocialToo’s DM blocking option you’ll need to sign up and then select the appropriate options in their preferences.