Amazon sends out a ton of emails. Some of those are useful—alerts that your order went through or about problems with an order, for example. But the rest can get on your nerves. Here’s how to banish every last one of them.
Amazon would really prefer to send you more or less whatever it wants, so the settings for all of these emails are buried deep in its customer account pages. Follow these steps one by one to stop receiving all the emails you don’t want.
Step One: Sign In to Amazon and Head To Your Account Page
First, head to Amazon.com (or the regional version for your location), You’ll need to do this using a desktop web browser or by requesting the desktop site in your mobile browser. For whatever reason, you can’t reach the option on the mobile version of their site, or in their mobile app.
Click the “Account & Lists” button in the upper-right corner of the page, and sign in if you haven’t done so already. Click the “Your Account” item on the dropdown list.
This page contains all of the settings for your Amazon account. Note that settings for other Amazon properties—like Audible, Woot, Kindle Publishing, and so on—are not included. You’ll need to disable emails for those services separately.
Step Two: Configure Your Communication Preferences
The first thing we’ll do, now that we’ve arrived on the account page, is to configure a few communication preferences. These preferences include things like whether you get any promotional material through physical mail, how you want emails you do receive formatted, and the types of categories for which you do or don’t want to see promotional emails.
On your account page, look for the “Email, alerts, messages, and ads” section, and then click the “Communication preferences” link. To make things even quicker, you can just head straight to the Communications Preferences page with this link (you’ll be asked to sign in if you’re not already).
This page has three settings groups: Marketing Information by Post, General Settings, and Promotional Emails. Let’s take them one by one.
Expand the “Marketing Information by Post” section first. The setting here deals with physical mail (printed catalogs, membership information, and so on). If you don’t want to receive any physical mail from Amazon, select the “Do not send me marketing information by mail” option, and then click the “Update” button.
Next, expand the “General Settings” section. Again, there is only one setting here, and it controls how the email you do get is formatted: HTML (with text and images) or plain text (no images). Make your selection, and then click the “Update” button.
Next, expand the “Promotional Emails” section. This is what you’re really looking for. You’ll find In this area are dozens of different categories that, when enabled, indicate that you want to receive promotional marketing emails relating to that specific department. You can enable as many or as few as you like.
And if you don’t want any marketing email at all, you don’t have to uncheck every box individually. Instead, select the “Do not send me any marketing email for now” option at the bottom of the list. When you’ve made your selections, click the “Update” button to enable the changes.
Step Three: Configure Your Email Subscriptions
For whatever reason, you have to configure Amazon’s email subscriptions separate from the promotional emails you configured in the previous section.
Back on the main “Your Account” page, under that same “Email alerts, messages, and ads” section, click the “Email” link.
This page shows the email subscriptions in which you’re currently enrolled.
By default, you should see all of your enabled subscriptions under the “Current Subscriptions” list. Turn off the switch on the far right for whatever you don’t want to receive—you should see the entry in the “Frequency” column change briefly to an “Unsubscribed” confirmation message.
To double-check, click the “Browse All Subscriptions” tab. This is the master list of all Amazon email subscriptions. Make sure all of the options you don’t want are turned off (the switch icon is set to white, not orange).
As if to drive the point home that they really would prefer to annoy you with emails, Amazon will send you an email confirming that you don’t want to receive any email from the lists you just disabled. Ugh.
Step Four: Use Your Email Client to Block Message You Can’t Stop Amazon From Sending
Unfortunately, there are some types of emails you can’t stop just using your Amazon account settings. Many of these emails are actually somewhat useful. They include things like order confirmations, shipment confirmations, messages about your account, and message from private sellers and buyers in the Amazon Marketplace.
While you probably don’t want to block any of these official messages from Amazon, you may find that some private buyers and sellers like sending you spam. Maybe you just placed one order with them, and now they won’t stop bugging you about submitting feedback, writing reviews, or buying more of their stuff. Those types of messages, you might want to block.
To find these types of messages, head once again back to the main “Your Account” page. This time, click the “Message center” link.
The Message Center is Amazon’s internal interface for managing messages from Amazon (or private sellers and buyers), and they’re broken up into several handy tabs. Each of the messages here also gets sent to your email address, but it is kind of useful being able to come to Amazon’s site and find them all.
Like we mentioned, you probably want to keep receiving the official Amazon emails. But, switch over to the “Buyer/Seller Messages” tab, and you’ll probably notice some of those spam message we were talking about.
Unfortunately, there’s no built in way to stop Amazon from sending these messages to your email inbox. But you can stop them another way—by blocking specific addresses in your email client.
Head to your email service of choice—I’ll use my Gmail account as an example. What you’re going to do is set up a spam filter that stops the unnecessary emails from third-party sellers from reaching your inbox while still allowing practical emails, like shipping notifications. For Gmail, you can manually add a filter by clicking the gear button in the upper-right, and then clicking the “Settings” option. On the Settings page, click the “Filters and blocked addresses” link.
On that page, click the “Create a new filter” link. In the window that pops up, type “marketplace.amazon.com” into the “Has the words” field. Don’t use the “From” field, since that will only search for full email addresses. Next, click the “create filter with this search” link.
Now, you can choose some options for how to handle emails that match the filter. If you don’t want to see these message at all, you can check the “Delete it” box. In that case, you’ll have to go Amazon’s site to see those messages. If you want to still have them in Gmail so that you can search them later, you have a few options:
- Select the “Mark as read” to have the messages still appear in your inbox, but get marked as read
- Select the “Skip the Inbox (Archive it)” option, and you’ll never see the incoming message. It will be there if you search for it though.
- Select the “Apply the label” option (and select a label) to automatically categorize those messages.
- Use a combination of these options. For example, you could apply a label and mark the messages as read.
Just note that the rules you set up apply to all messages from the marketplace. This diminishes your ability to react quickly on the occasion that sellers have a legitimate need to contact you, like a product recall.
The above instructions are for Gmail, but you should be able to replicate the spam filter with similar steps in almost any email service or program.
Image credit: Shutterstock/hanss
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