Getting too many emails from orkut?

Posted by Eduardo Thuler, Product Manager

I am. Though I'm happy to receive emails when I get a new scrap or someone is requesting friendship, lately it seems every orkut friend is sending emails to "all friends" -- which turns into a whole lotta email! So we've made some changes which will hopefully decrease the unwanted messages and help you direct email just to the friends you want. Here's a summary of what's new.

1. Until now, you've gotten a message whenever someone you invited as a friend has accepted your request. Now the default for this notification is off. If you'd like to change it, go to settings, then the notification settings tab and check the box next to "new friend approvals."
   
2. You receive a message when you're invited to join a community. If you're getting a lot of these, we figured you might like to turn it off. To do so go to the notification settings tab and and uncheck the boxes next to "community invite notifications."
   
3. To prevent unwanted spam, you can no longer send messages to ALL your orkut friends at once. Now that we improved our feature to group friends, we thought that you can start using them to address only those who you know will want to receive your message.
4. Messages to communities will only exist for moderated communities. Many of us join these because we want to associate the name and picture of the community and have it on our profile, but we don't want to participate actively. This is common, and we call these "badge communities." Strangely, sometimes people think it's a good idea to email ALL members of these (often huge and unmoderated) badge communities, which translates into a whole lot of spammy email.
   

We hope you think these are good first steps to lightening your orkut email load. We'll continue to work on more solutions until you can pick exactly what kind of notifications you'd like to receive -- and with luck, that shouldn't be too far off!