I know it's a matter of taste, and one of the things I like about Multiply is the amount of choice we have so we can tailor it to our personal preferences. Personally, I've had an on-off relationship with email alerts - started with, at some stage turned them off, and then later on turned them back on again.
Why? Well, at first I just left them on because that was the default option and it takes a while to get a feel of all this and see what you want to change. Then there came a point when I felt I was getting far too many emails, and do I really want an email telling me that my friend Joe Bloggs has entered an event on his calendar which is... wait for it... Passover is coming... no, I thought, this is too much.
But later on I found myself returning to email alerts as a way of retaining my sanity - being a member of several groups, my Multiply Inbox was full of stuff and the summary it provides is not always enough to tell me if this is really something I want to read, so I was having to click on each item just to find that I wasn't interested in it. The beauty of email alerts is they give you the full post, not just a summary, so you can easily glance through these posts in your mailbox and very quickly and easily delete what you're not interested in. (Another plus: deleting the email doesn't affect what goes on in your Multiply Inbox, so you can still go back to this post if you change your mind.)
And of course you can set up a filter in your mailbox so that anything that comes from Multiply goes to a separate folder, so it doesn't have to clutter the rest of your emails.
The one niggle I've found is in the following scenario:
Joe Bloggs posts something, let's just for example say that he says: It's raining today.
I get an email saying that Joe Bloggs has posted a new blog, which reads: It's raining today.
I choose to respond, saying: Oh really, no rain where I live, the sun's been out all day.
(Bear with me, I live in England, discussions about the weather are normal here...)
However, in the meantime Joe Bloggs has edited his post to say: They said it was going to rain today but it hasn't happened yet. (Okay, this example isn't very logical, but hopefully you'll still get my drift.)
The email alert doesn't get updated. So I will only find out about this after posting my now-irrelevant reply.
So that's just something to bear in mind - if someone edits a post, the email alert doesn't tell you about that.
(And by the way, it is raining here today. The air smells lovely - like it's been washed. The garden is looking very happy. And I'm pleased because once again I'm relieved of the responsibility to wash the car...)
