Twitter has been rolling out a new setting that tends to annoy those users that have received it already. It’s not available to all accounts as of writing but it’s been getting pushed out since last week. The setting can be found under your Account Settings on the Notifications tab.
‘Email me when “I’m sent a reply or mentioned”‘ is the new setting and unfortunately it’s on by default. Although it’s simply a matter of unchecking the box, for some Twitter accounts, this can lead to a lot of messages in your inbox that you have no control over. While you can control who can send you a direct message (you both have to follow each other), anybody could mention you in a tweet.
If this setting were to be rolled out to your account right before stepping away from your e-mail and Twitter for a while, you might come back to a filled inbox. The setting is nice for the additional flexibility it provides but I’m not sure I agree that turning it on by default was the best choice.
Just head into the Notifications settings page, uncheck the box in front of it, and save the settings to quiet your inbox and get back to the experience you were used to.
In somewhat related news, Twitter has introduced a new access type for Twitter applications. It usually defaults to ‘Read & Write’ or ‘Read-only’ but recently ‘Read, Write, & Private Message’ was also introduced as an option.