Controlling Yahoo Groups email reception

…Or, how to  reduce email without leaving the group…

I work with a job search group called Job Connections (http://www.jobconnections.org) which connects to members with a Yahoo group. It’s a moderated group whose membership is generally restricted to people who have actually attended a Job Connections meeting.

It’s a pretty busy group, so there are a lot of emails that get sent out (mostly about job postings that somebody received and is not interested in pursuing). As a result, the most frequently asked question to the group is: “How do I reduce the amount of email I receive from the group without leaving the group?”

Fortunately, Yahoo groups have preference settings that you can use to control the level of email you get sent.

The basic options are:

1. Individual Email – Receive every message posted to the group
2. Daily Digest – Receive a summary of up to 25 messages in a daily email.
3. Special notices – Receive only messages from the moderator
4. Web only – no email ever, you have to log into the group to see the messages.

The easiest way to edit the preferences is to go to http://groups.yahoo.com/mygroups?edit=1 and change the settings. If you are not yet logged into your Yahoo account, you’ll get the login screen:

After logging in, you’ll see the group edit page that will look something like this:

Just click the “Message Delivery” drop down to change to one of the options described earlier.

Alternatively, you can log into the group and click on the “Edit membership” link at the upper left corner of the page and change things there.

Clicking that link takes you to the membership preferences page for that group where you can change a number of things, including the email preferences:

Finally, if you want to control your email options via email, Yahoo also provides a way to do that. Basically there are email aliases that let you set a number of your preferences simply by sending an email to them (more fully described in Yahoo help at  http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/groups/original/members/email/email-01.html):

• To put the group’s email message delivery on hold, send a blank message to:
  cpc_job_connections-nomail@yahoogroups.com
• To change your subscription to daily digest mode, send a blank message to:
  cpc_job_connections-digest@yahoogroups.com
• To change your subscription to individual emails from the group, send a blank message to:
  cpc_job_connections-normal@yahoogroups.com

Please Note: The email addresses above are specific to Job Connections, to do the same for a different group, replace “cpc_job_connections” in the above commands with the actual name of the group (e.g., pastry_chefs-subscribe@yahoogroups.com)