February 21st Update:

Today we deleted the twitterfollow@tweetlater.com email address and switched off the autoresponder that has been sending messages for many days asking folks to disable the forwarding rule. The autoresponder was causing an enormous load on the mail system and interfered with the keyword alert emails and @replies emails that we send out. Hence, this is the reason why the forwarded emails are now bouncing as undeliverable.

Original February 4th Announcement:

Thanks to a positive addition to the Twitter API, TweetLater was able implement a completely different way of identifying new followers.

We now get that information directly from the Twitter API, and we do not need your forwarded Twitter new follower notification emails anymore.

Please remove/delete/inactivate the forwarding rule that forwards emails to twitterfollow@tweetlater.com.

You can do this right now because we have already migrated the new follower processing for your Twitter account over to the new and far more efficient method.

At this point in time we’ll be processing your new followers once a day, but we may do it more often in the future.

Even though we process your followers once a day, we automatically spread out your welcome message throughout the day. Your new followers won’t all get their welcome messages at the same time. In other words, if you publish public welcome tweets, your timeline will not be littered with a bunch of welcome messages all at once. And, if you send DMs, you will see the DMs drip-feed into your Sent DM folder throughout the day.

If you have new follower vetting turned on in TweetLater, then know that it will still work as before. The only change is that your new followers are added to that list once a day now, as opposed to through-out the day. (If you haven’t checked out the new follower vetting feature yet, please do so now. It is really cool.)

There’s a lot of good news in this announcement. If you’ve struggled in the past to get your automation working, it will now “just work” (provided that we still have your valid Twitter username and password on file).