A couple more new features and commands!

I’ve heard enough outta you!

Now you can “gag” a specific person (or persons) in your Twitter stream, so that thier updates will not be sent to your email. So if there are people who you don’t mind reading on the web, but really don’t want to see on your mobile phone, you can gag them. You will still be following them on Twitter, but we’ll stop thier status updates from reaching your email.

Just send the command… off {username}

Without the brackets ofcourse. So if you got sick of me whining about this morning’s database troubles, you could have sent off tweetbymail and you’d be bothered no more.

Of course, once you’ve hugged and made up, you can send the reverse command on {username} to resume the incoming tweets.

Stop drinking from the firehose!

The way TweetByMail works, it’s actually grabbing new updates for you every five minutes or so, and then sending them all to you. You may have noticed how the updates come in batches… that’s why. If you are following a lot of people, you may find yourself getting a big chunk of email every five minutes. No fun.

Now you can throttle your incoming tweets. The absolute maximum you can get per batch is 20. That’s a hard limit, as per the Twitter system. However, if you want to cut that down to five, you can send the command max 5 and you’ll get a response confirming the change. You can set your personal throttle anywhere between 1 and 20.

If you just send max without a number, you’ll get a response telling you the current throttle level.

Watch out for Big Brother, though! In light of the database troubles earlier today I added in a master throttle control. I can turn this up and down as needed for testing, or solving problems. If your personal throttle is higher than the master throttle, your sending limit will be cut down to match the master setting.

Gags and throttles don’t always get along.

One thing to watch out for. When TweetByMail grabs the new updates for you, it gets the newest 20 (since the last batch). After it grabs those 20, it removes updates from anybody on your gag list. Only after that does it send out the messages.

So lets say ChattyCathy is on your gag list. In the last 5 minutes she spews out 12 tweets. 20 minus 12… 8 tweets left in the pile. Even if your throttle is 10, ChattyCathy has taken up too many spots. As a result, there may be new tweets that were not grabbed in the initial 20… and won’t ever be delivered through TweetByMail. Bummer.

The solution when you only want to receive updates from a select few of your friends.

If you follow a ton of people with your Twitter account, but only want email updates from a few, it just won’t work. The subtractive nature of gagging everybody else will mean you’ll rarely get to see the real updates you want… they won’t make the cut.

In that case, your best bet is to create a new, exclusive Twitter account, follow only those you want email updates from, and hook that new account up through TweetByMail.

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