is someone on twitter able to see an at-message who isn't following you if you are on private settings?

[sheela]

if your account is set to private, so that only your approved followers can see your tweets, can you send an at-message to someone outside your followers? will they be able to see it? i can see both sides of this, because technically they are not following you, however, you are sending it to them even so. so... what will twitter do in this situation?

[Warren]

No they will not see this message.

You would not be sending them a message, you would simply be tweeting something that has their name "mentioned". If that user were to check his/her mentions, they would not see your tweet because to them it does not exist.