Facebook had a busy few weeks. It rolled out a new privacy suite and friends list feature, it redesigned the News Feed and announced new profiles. In the middle of those changes, Facebook also started testing a new feature that overrides all your original email notification settings.
Facebook seems to have had good intentions with this feature. It’s acknowledged before that it believes email is a thing of the past, and the new feature does significantly reduce how much email it sends you. Instead of emailing you as your original preferences indicated, Facebook will send you an email once a week with a summary of what happened.
While this feature might be a attractive to some, it does pose a problem: Not only does Facebook automatically opt you in, you no longer immediately know when you have a new friend request, when someone sends you a message, comments on your posts or posts something to your wall.
This could be a concern if you’ve opened up your profile to Subscriptions, which I’ve found several problems with, as you will likely want to know who posts what to your wall, when it happens.
New friend requests and new messages are indicated at the top of your Facebook page with a small number, but it’s easy to overlook them. If you want to reset your email preferences to your original settings, here’s what to do.
[Want more tips, tricks and analysis on Facebook? Check out CIO.com’s Facebook Bible.]
First, click the drop-down menu in the top right corner of your Facebook homepage and select Account Settings. Click Notifications on the left-side menu and uncheck the box at the top below Email Frequency.
Below that, you’ll see a list of your notifications from today, and past notifications from the week before. Following that section is “All Notifications,” where your original notification settings should be saved. Click the Edit button next to each section to view which emails you will receive and tweak them if necessary.
Facebook has added significantly more notification options—and,it appears, has opted you in to all of them. If you do choose to restore your original settings and opt out of the summary emails, be sure to adjust every setting under each group to ensure you’re only receiving emails that are important to you.