I get way too much email from Meetup.com for the couple of groups I’m in and want to quit the groups. How do I quickly and easily leave a meetup group?
First off, before you bail completely, please know that there are various ways that you can change and alter your Meetup settings so that you get less email, all the way down to where you get zero email at all and are still in all of your various groups on the site. I’ll show you how to do that, but I want to ensure that you’re not going too far just because of the amount of mail you’re getting.
I actually have a theory that more and more sites are adding opt-in settings and automatically opting you in to them because you signed up for the original set of permissions; I get a lot more email than I did even a year ago, not just from Meetup but from dozens upon dozens of sites. It’s frustrating and it’s a matter of some self-discipline to just go through and click on the unsubscribe links in the emails or go to the settings and dial things back down.
But let’s go back to Meetup.com! There are two areas where you can tweak and adjust the amount of email you get; one is on a per-group basis (so if it’s one group that has tons of meetings and is overwhelming you, that’s the one you can adjust) and a second settings area where you can change things for your entire membership across all groups.
To start, go to the meetup.com site and click on your tiny profile picture in the top right. You’ll get a menu that shows the half-dozen groups you’re in with recent activity and some other options:
Go into a specific group – like my “1 Million Cups Boulder” and you can choose “Email and Notifications” from the same menu (it changes slightly because you’re in a group, as you can see below):
Choose “Email and Notifications” from this Meetup.com menu and you’ll see a zillion options for fine-tuning what email you’re sent from the group activities and events:
Obviously there are lot of ways you can tweak and adjust things to slow down the flood of email as desired. In particular I find that turning off “new comments on a meetup” and daily meetup reminders are quite easily disabled and slow things down nicely.
Not enough? Well, you can quit the group from that same menu by simply choosing “Leave this Group“, which prompts for a quick explanation to the meetup organizer:
Before you quit all your groups, though, go back to the home page and on the main menu choose “Settings“. Then make sure you’re looking at Email and Notifications because, well, there are a lot of other ways you can stem the tide:
Between all of these options, you should be able to clean up your email chaos and remain in whatever groups you like. One tip: Just get notifications of new meetups scheduled. In most groups that’s pretty infrequent so it can be an easy way to stay plugged in without being overwhelmed.