The interweb is a wonderful place. Well, scratch that… more like the interweb can connect you with wonderful people.

A few days ago I made a casual post seeking a prize sponsor to commemorate the 1 millionth tweet to be delivered through TweetByMail. I threw it out there, and wasn’t really expecting any results, but Wendy stepped up!

Wendy is an entrepreneur near Vancouver, Canada who has developed a new product for tea drinkers, making loose-leaf teas more convenient to have on-the-go. Even if you aren’t a tea drinker yourself, it’s a well-designed product that would make a great gift for anyone who wants to enjoy a “tea moment”.

Take a look at www.libretea.com

She has generously offered up four prizes… the near-unbreakable “poly n’ glass” model… for various milestones:

1 Millionth tweet delivered - Already been reached! Winner: @brutalbattery

1.5 Million - Coming up fast

3 Million -My email server shudders at the thought.

5 Million - Which is rather optomistic on Wendy’s part!

To win, all you have to do is be receiving tweets through TweetByMail.

Be sure to say Hi to Wendy on Twitter @libretea

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Hey folks, TweetByMail is coming up fast on delivering it’s one-millionth tweet by email. Coming up very fast, as in “I should have brought this up a week ago” fast.

For me, personally, delivering a million emails is more cause for concern than celebration, but what the heck…

I’m thinking it would be fun to offer a prize to the lucky Twitterer who is the recipient of that milestone tweet. I don’t have the budget for anything fancy, so I thought I’d put it out there to the twittersphere to see if anybody is interested in offering up a prize. I’m not picky, I’ll take anything that’s offered.

Keep in mind, TweetByMail users are a worldwide crowd, and delivering the prize will be part of the sponsorship. (so small or virtual items are perfect)

Please drop me a note at ryan@tweetbymail.com. (and please don’t dilly-dally, as this is happening in a matter of day(s) from now)

Thanks!

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I’m looking for some help with a TweetByMail.

(In case you’re just joining us) I created this site as a solution for Twitter users outside the US who are unable to get SMS service to send and/or receive tweets to a mobile phone. (aka: Me!) It replicates the SMS features found in the US, but uses email to deliver messages to your mobile phone or any inbox.

It’s a free service, and I’m just fresh out of time I can dedicate to it right now. The service is running great, and gaining happy users every day, but the site design is a mess. (okay, maybe not a “mess”… but it needs some TLC)

I’m hoping to find a fellow twitterholic wordpress designer to lend some love to the project and make it look as good as it should.

The task is open to creative interpretation, but it’s a matter of designing a nice wordpress theme, or cleaning up what I’ve got going on here. After that, if you’re still raring to go, I’d like to work with you to make the content more elegantly explain the service.

There’s no financial compensation here. The project only COSTS me money, and there’s no plan for revenue. (definitely no intention of wrecking the sanctity of the service with ads)

With somebody else looking after the aesthetics, I can focus my available time on improving the technical side. I would much appreciate the help!

If you’re a Twitter-loving, Wordpress-hugging designer interested in lending some free time, please contact me. No big commitments required.

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The Twitter application TweetBySnailMail.com offers a service to submit your status updates to Twitter on your behalf via the United States Postal Service. That website was launched mere days after the announcement of TweetByMail.com, a similar service, except that it uses email rather than standard postal mail. Clearly this was an aggressive counter-measure by my competitors to undermine the growing popularity of TweetByMail in offering a copy-cat solution.

However, the two services chose very different technological architecture to build thier services upon.

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Ooops! I was in the process of making upgrades to the tweet update filter system (allowing you to blacklist or whitelist updates from specific users), and while doing so made a silly mistake causing all existing account filters to be removed. Filters can be put back into place using the new web management page, or by sending the command off {username}

Also, in the same stroke of brilliance, I un-verified all email accounts for using the short address (@tw2.ca) for sending updates and commands. You will have to verify your email accounts again by sending verify {secretcode} from that address.

I apologize profusely for this inconvenience, but hopefully the additions to the filter system will overshadow this little slip.

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Lemme hear ya on the dance floor! I say wha? (wha!) I say wha? (wha!) Let’s raise the roof on this joint!

After a revelation sent unto me by a member of the holy Twitter API team (thanks Matt!) we’re now able to send more tweets from the TweetByMail service.

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I got a kick out of a brand new site that was proudly inspired by the launch of our service here at TweetByMail.

Finally, I can get my grandma using Twitter with help from TweetBySnailMail.com

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The TweetByMail server throttle is now set full on, meaning it will allow a maximum of 20 new tweets to be sent per batch (every 5 minutes).

By default, however, your personal throttle is set to 10. You can change this by sending the command max 20 (but you can set any number from 1 to 20)

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(insert heavy sigh of relief)

Wow, what a day.

I quietly launched TweetByMail a couple days ago. I poked around Twitter looking for people in the same boat as me… Canadians who were missing the SMS updates. I sent a few personal invitations, posted the link in a couple places. I was looking for a small handful of keen testers.

However, in the early evening, there’s a distant rumble. Turns out, the CEO of Twitter caught wind of the project and mentioned it to his followers. All 33,342 of them. That was pretty nice of him to do. Mostly, it shows that the recent loss of SMS updates for Canadians and international users is something that bothers them, and they are happy to suggest solutions in the meantime.

Anyhoo, that mention shot off like a rocket, getting re-tweeted all over the place. The response was overwhelming. Overwhelming as in totally cool and I never was expecting so much attention… but also overwhelming as in literally overwhelming. The server crashed. (Arrrrrgh!)

I’ve since discovered the problem, though, and fixed it so it won’t happen again. Have you ever been to a wedding, where the drunk uncle takes the microphone and wanders right in front of the speaker, causing a horrendous loud noise? Yup, feedback. And endless loop that gets worse as it goes. Well, that’s what brought down TweetByMail today. No, not a drunken uncle. Feedback of the digital sort. Due to a mis-configured email filter (gee, who did that?) messages were bouncing around inside like fleas on a frying pan.

Wow, what a day.

Despite all that, I did manage to add some cool updates. New commands for gagging and throttling. (sounds violent when you say it like that) Just now I finished the first step to processing rich text messages. It’s been a great day. Plenty of new people using the service. (I hope those that had a rough go with the crashing will come back again!)

Oh, and even with the service still throttled down, we just passed 1000 outgoing tweets!

Thank you, folks!

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After just a slight distraction earlier today (such as catastrophic server crashes… now resolved!) I managed to get back on track with my goal for the day… letting TweetByMail understand and process HTML formatted messages.

As of now, it can succesfully handle HTML “Rich Text” emails coming from Gmail.com.

For now, any other HTML emails will still return the “Plain text only” reminder message. Sorry about that, but I need to collect a bit more samples before I’m confident that it will handle the message alright. Better safe than making a mess of your Twitter account.

Speaking of making a mess, I also had my first run in with an encoded message. After spitting out gobbledy-gook the first few times, I’ve now got it so that a base64 encoded message will be first decoded, then processed.

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