How to stop Facebook notification emails
Wednesday, April 18, 2012 at 09:17AM Ask Dave Taylor: How do I stop Facebook notification email bugging me?
My Dad only lets me check Facebook once a week to ensure that I focus on my schoolwork, which is fine with me as it's usually just a huge waste of time. Problem is, Facebook keeps reminding me every day that I don't log in that I'm "missing out" on lots of updates. How can I just get Facebook to shut up about what's going on?
Dave's Answer:
I'm impressed that your Dad's given you a rule about Facebook usage and you're following it so strictly. He's done a good job of raising you, I'd say. But then again, I'm a Dad so I think fathers should get at least 50% if not 100% of the credit for raising great children. :-)
You're right to be wary of the time sink that is Facebook too. It's great fun and certainly interesting to see what's going on with your friends and family, but it can also be a never-ending process and one that's smart to ration. Yes, you'll miss things, but that's inevitable anyway unless you obsessively check out what's going on and if you're doing that, you've just relegated yourself to the role of observer, rather than someone who is actually doing cool and fun things and posting occasional updates that make other people want to know what's going on in your life.
Facebook also has about a million different events it can email you about, and they can be quite annoying because by default I think every single thing is enabled.
Let's fix that.
But before we do, here's a typical "you haven't visited for a while" email that you might get from Facebook if you're not connecting all the time:
All well and good, but if you don't want to be reminded that there are things going on in Facebook-land, rather annoying too.
To disable it, or just set it so that Facebook emails you when there's something actually important going on, log in and click on Account Settings:
On the left there's a menu. Pick "Notifications":
Now you'll see a sort of summary of what notifications have been sent, along with the ability to modify specific notification settings. Notice also on the top right the "Email Frequency" option:
You can click on the checkbox adjacent to "Email Frequency" if you'd like to just let Facebook slow down the flow of messages, but instead let's fine tune things ourselves because, well, it's Facebook's zeal at trying to get us to visit the site that's caused the problem in the first place!
Click on "Edit" adjacent to "Facebook" under the "All Notifications" section and you'll see that, as I suggested earlier, there are a zillion different settings:
I suggest you spend a few minutes going through this list and disable just about everything. Do you need an email when someone confirms a friend request? Joins FB after your invite? Posts content? Likes a post you're tagged in?
Yeah, I thought not.
Make the changes you want, then click on "Save Changes" and you're good to go.
My experience with social media is that it's all a huge time sink and while it's fun and interesting, I have a life to live, so I try to balance things because the digital world's always going to be there, but life itself is rather fleeting...