How to Stop Getting Emails from Twitter

Twitter may not have the number of users that other social media sites have (read Facebook), but it is a great place if you want to stay updated and follow news on your favorite topics.

However, if you are following too many accounts and hashtags, things can quickly go out of hand and you will be bombarded with more updates than you can possibly read. We are all guilty of that at one time or another.

When I first started using Twitter, I got more emails than I knew what to do with. Twitter thinks it’s a good idea to send you an email when someone follows you, likes your tweet, retweets your tweet and retweets, or mentions you. They will also send you occasional recommendation emails.

I also get an email every time I login to my account but its a useful security feature. But I am sure better off not having to check the other notification emails.

Fun Fact: Evan Williams, one of Twitter’s founder, wanted to name the company FriendStalker! Creepy name. Thankfully, others thought so too

Let’s see how you can manage your emails.

How to Stop Getting Emails from Twitter

Open your browser and visit Twitter. Log in to your account, the one from which you don’t want to receive email notifications.

In case you didn’t know:

Click on your profile pic near the search bar on the upper right side of your screen.

Select Settings and privacy from the drop down menu.

This is where you can manage your whole account from notifications to blocking annoying people to everything in between.

Click on Email notifications in the left pane.

This tab is divided into three main parts. Let’s see what we can enable and disable within each of them.

Activity related to you and your tweets

This setting is responsible for sending you emails whenever something happens that directly affects you or your account.

For example, you receive a DM or a direct message in your inbox, when someone emails you a tweet or when you have new notifications.

What do you mean by notifications, you ask? It’s kinda vague. These notifications are when you are followed, when one of your contacts signs up for Twitter, when your tweet is liked, tweeted or retweeted, and when someone mentions you in a tweet.

Fun Fact:

Twitter will send you a ‘digest’ email which will club some of your account related activities together to reduce an avalanche of emails. Still, I suggest you disable all three of them.

The second option is for direct messages which can be annoying marketing messages from random people.

Twitter clearly states in the help page that DMs are not part of their digest emails. It means you will get an email for every DM! Receiving DMs is bad enough, you don’t need emails for them too.

Here is a solution.

You can actually prevent unknown people from sending you DMs by going to Privacy and safety tab. Under Direct Messages, uncheck Receive Direct Messages from anyone. You will now receive only DMs from people you follow.

Moving on with the email settings.

Activity from your network

There are two checkmarks here. The first one is where Twitter is trying to play a news channel … and why not? They are the hub of breaking news. The focus is your network, people and accounts that you are following that will account for the updates.

I follow some local news channels, tech websites, bloggers and Jennifer Lawrence. Twitter is a great way to stay on top of what’s happening in near real time.

The second one is for updates on the performance of the tweets that you have sent out. Expect things like number of retweets, likes, and so on. You will also get occasional recommendations from Twitter on accounts that you should consider following based on your current following and tweets.

Note:

Updates from Twitter

This is where Twitter will send you all the promotional emails that you can do without, for the most part.

You can uncheck the following without further thinking:

• News about Twitter on partner products and other third party services
• Participation in Twitter research surveys
• Suggestions for recommended accounts
• Suggestions based on your recent follows

The rest is a personal choice, but I have unchecked all of them.

I suggest you play around with your settings for some time and see what you want and don’t want to see in your inbox.