Hi. I'm at TechCrunch and this is an FYI. I saw this and reached out to Tiny Post and got a response. Short version: it was a test they were running and is now being taken down. Slightly longer story here <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/20/tiny-post-bot/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/20/tiny-post-bot/</a>
Before you jump to conclusions, please be aware its definitely possible that TP isnt doing this directly but that it is a bot doing this to get these users more followers or something.<p>Keep in mind most networks have this problem ( twitter, fb, etc.. ) where users will follow anyone/anything to get themself more followers or traffic.
The too-hip photos give them away as fakes. Looks like they are all from models and fashion blogs:<p><a href="http://seedofstyle.com/manila-streets/" rel="nofollow">http://seedofstyle.com/manila-streets/</a><p><a href="http://www.iamgalla.com/2012/07/70s-groove.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.iamgalla.com/2012/07/70s-groove.html</a><p><a href="http://kolonelmustard.tumblr.com/image/28952930859" rel="nofollow">http://kolonelmustard.tumblr.com/image/28952930859</a><p>I'm not saying you should do this kind of astroturfing (please don't)... but if you wanted to, a more realistic feeling way would be to use the FB Graph API and randomly select names and photos from there. Example: <a href="https://graph.facebook.com/4?fields=picture,id,name,first_name,last_name,username,gender,locale" rel="nofollow">https://graph.facebook.com/4?fields=picture,id,name,first_na...</a>
Maybe I missed it, but I couldn't see how it was 'obvious [that] Tiny Post is running these fake accounts as bots in order to fool their users.'<p>The argument seems to be 'Accounts which look like bots are posting on my otherwise dormant account, therefore the service provider is using shady practices to try and re-engage me.'<p>It is not a stretch to believe that this is the case, however it is equally plausible (to me) that the alleged bot accounts are run by a third party. I might have missed some aspect of the argument, however.
I signed up for but never used Tiny Post, and I'm still getting emails about people following me. People with very similar accounts to the ones Dave mentioned.<p>For example, check out this profile: <a href="http://tinypost.co/users/jonig/#tab1" rel="nofollow">http://tinypost.co/users/jonig/#tab1</a><p>If you go through the list of people that "Joni" follows, you'll see that most of them don't seem to have posted anything either.
This is why I think CAN-SPAM shouldn't exempt "transactional or relationship messages" (and I send over 75,000 e-mails a week..!) Every automated/transactional mail, commercial or otherwise, should have an unsubscribe link or mechanism these days due to the noise.