“I Wish The ‘is now following you’ emails from Twitter were more useful”

Every few days, I get an email from twitter telling me that someone new is following me. 70% of the time it’s spammers, 20% of the time it’s people I don’t care about, and 10% of the time it’s people who I want to follow back (and I’m thankful that twitter gave me the heads up!)

The problem:
Though these emails include a few statistics about the user (number of tweets, number of followers, number of people following), they don’t include any of their actual tweets. This is unfortunate, because the best way to tell whether or not you care about someone on twitter is to look at what they say! As it is, I have to click a link in the email to visit their profile if I want to do that.

The solution:
Some python that I wrote, which logs in to your email, finds these messages from twitter, deletes them, and sends you more useful messages that
include recent tweets by the person who has just followed you!

In the future, I’d like to make this happen for identica as well. Also, I’d like to (and am very confident that I can write the code to) be able to follow the person back by responding to the email.