Twitter: Someone using your email address to send Spam?

As one of the few people in the world who has never created a Twitter account, I was disappointed when a certain email was sent to my address.

Welcome to Twitter, emariswgne. Wait a minute? Who is emariswgne?

Naturally I figured it was probably an account phish, but lo and behold, the user name does exist and is using my email address. The account was quickly suspended for sending spam.

Saying goodnight to Cialis obviously raises a huge red flag!

I was wondering how in the world could someone sign my email address up for twitter? Maybe my email account was phished and they were using my password. I was skeptical of this and I tested out a little hypothesis of mine. Let’s create a twitter account using any email address I chose. Congrats a new twitter account was created!

It seems you can use just about anyone’s email address provided they did not sign up for Twitter themselves. Even though  Twitter doesn’t  initially care about which email address you are using, they take the time to blacklist them for sending spam. If I ever wanted to use my email address in the future, I am now forbidden to under their suspension rules. Of course you can email Twitter support but why would they want to waste their time responding to a “spammer“.

How long will they take to respond?
“Emanuele Swafford from Hawaii” isn’t going to wait forever.

It’s pretty easy for Twitter to rectify this problem. All Twitter really needs to do is set up some form of email confirmation. Considering Twitter is a social networking site, I have no idea why they would ever skip such a useful feature many websites use to avoid spammers.

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