Twimailer's original developer, Jon Weatley, put the site up for sale on the SitePoint Marketplace in early March, right after he received a number of very positive mentions from promintent Twitter users like Kevin Rose and Tim O'Reilly. The site was put up for sale exactly one day after our own positive review of the service, and it eventually sold for $2,500.

According to Topify, the current seller, who is based in Romania, claims that he is too busy to maintain the service. Other warning signs for Topify were that Twimailer's site features no terms of service (something to think about before you give your Twitter credentials and/or email address to a third party!), and that the site still features Twimailer's now deactivated Twitter account. Twimailer also never notified its users about the sale.

This whole affair does indeed seem rather shady and we think Topify's developers did the right thing when they decided not to buy Twimailer. Topify's developers couldn't help to note that Twimailer, because of its small size, wouldn't be much of an asset anyway.

Use Twimailer? Change Your Password

Twimailer didn't take users' Twitter credentials, but, as we pointed out in our review, users had to forward their direct messages and other email from Twitter to the service, which would include any password change notifications. Twimailer is currently down, and if you are paranoid about somebody hacking into your Twitter account, this might be a good time to change your password.

More and more services are now using Twitter's oAuth implementation, which should make using third-party applications a lot safer by default. For Twitter web apps that don't use oAuth yet, however, it is worth considering their terms of service and other factors to see if this is a reputable company. Even then, though, there are still some risks, as this example from Twimailer clearly shows.

The benefits are clear, but just like with other services hoping to ride Twitter's rise to fame, the lack of a Twitter authentication mechanism means that you must give Topify both your login name and password, and redirect your Twitter notification emails to the Topify service. This requires a lot of trust on your part.  The good news is the site has a fairly broadly-worded privacy policy:

Privacy policy (of sorts): Rest assured we will never knowingly disclose, sell, give away or otherwise use any personal information collected during your use of this site (namely, the twitter usernames and passwords provided). Honest.

Finally, we would like to compare the 'enhanced' Twitter follow email between Topify and Twimailer. Topify in the last 24 hours has re-vamped their email to show the follower's information more clearly (see below), but there is one place where Twimailer still stands out - it lists the last 10 tweets from the follower, while Topify only shows one.

The scale, at least for us, still tips in Topify's favor though, for a few reasons. First, Topify adds more functionality than just an enhanced follow email. Second, although the privacy policy is still far from completely re-assuring, it's still better than Twimailer's. Third, we like that we can easily find Ouriel's Twitter and blog links, which we can't say for the somewhat mysterious creator(s) of Twimailer.

Last but not least, Ouriel has given ReadWriteWeb 50 free beta invites, so click on this link and get started!

Update:We were recently informed by Ouriel in the comments that the updated notification email now contains the last 5 tweets, along with knowing if you are already following the person, and a link to promote Topify. You can see a screenshot of it here. Thanks, Ouriel!

We love things that make our life simpler, and Twimailer is about as straightforward as you can get. The enhanced email provides a bounty of information about the person that has followed you, and of course provides a link to their profile so you can follow them back. However, we do have to mention some security considerations with a service like this.

First, it stores your email address. Although the site says that it doesn't spam or store email bound for you, it doesn't mention what it does (if anything) with your actual email address. Especially with no fine print, Twimailer may just disappear tomorrow with that information in tow. Second, more than just new follower notifications are sent from Twitter. What happens to direct messages and password reset confirmations? These are risks you will need to think about before signing up.

Amber also wrote about Twimailer and points out a method using Google Mail (or Gmail) that lets you get around having to hand over all email control to Twimailer. Although a bit technical, Chris Messina (@chrismessina on Twitter) describes the process here.