How to turn off GitHub email notifications (without missing what matters)

Updated August 2026 · 4 min read

GitHub's default email settings are tuned for people who contribute to a handful of repos. If you work across dozens, your inbox fills with CI pings, release notes, and comment threads you were CC'd into once. Here's how to dial it back at every level — from "silence everything" to "only email me when someone asks me directly" — and how to replace email with something faster if you still need a prompt.

Account-wide: the three delivery settings

Go to Settings → Notifications (github.com/settings/notifications). Everything routes through two switches: Watching and Participating and @mentions. Under each, pick Email, Web, or both.

1. Uncheck Email under "Watching". This alone kills most of the flood. You'll stop getting mail for every repo you star-and-watch by accident.
2. Keep Participating and @mentions on Web only if you're live in github.com/notifications during the day.
3. Uncheck everything only if you have another way to see reviews and mentions promptly — more on that below.

Note: automatic watch. By default GitHub auto-watches every repo you create or get added to as a collaborator. Uncheck "Automatically watch repositories" on the same settings page to stop inheriting noise from every new project.

Per-repo: unwatch instead of unfollow

For a single noisy repo, open it and click Watch → Unwatch (or Ignoring if even @mentions shouldn't reach you there). Choosing Participating and @mentions only is usually the sweet spot: you keep PR reviews where you're tagged, but drop issue chatter from everyone else. Unwatching doesn't remove you as an assignee or reviewer — you still get those notifications under Participating rules.

The nuclear option, done safely

If you want zero emails but can't risk going dark:

1. Turn off all email delivery in Settings → Notifications.
2. Rely on github.com/notifications as your single inbox — check it at fixed times (it supports filters like reason:review-requested).
3. Set up a desktop presence so reviews and mentions surface themselves: either GitHub's official mobile app push notifications, or a menu bar app.

What breaks when email goes off

• Review requests. These are time-sensitive and easy to miss in a web inbox you only open twice a day. This is the one category worth replacing with a push-style channel rather than dropping.
• CI failure emails on your own pushes. Many people actually want these; keep Web + a menu bar badge instead of email so they're instant but not archived forever in your inbox.
• Security alerts. These arrive as a separate setting ("Security alert notifications") — leave them on regardless of how noisy things get.