Decide What Reaches Your Inbox and What Stays in the Dashboard
There is now one screen listing every kind of message your actor website can send you, with a switch for email and a switch for the dashboard against each. Set it once.
The two failure modes
Notification systems fail in exactly two ways and both are bad. Send too much and people build a filter, at which point the one message that mattered goes to a folder nobody opens. Send too little and somebody finds out three weeks late that a casting director filled in their contact form.
The only way out is to let the person decide, per type, which is what this screen does.
What is on the list
- Contact form messages. Leave this on. This is the one that matters.
- Press mentions we find for you. See press mentions.
- Ranking changes. Covered in STARmeter tracking.
- Product updates from us. Off is a perfectly good answer. We would eventually like these to be readable inside the admin instead, which is where what's new, inside the admin is heading.
- Account and security messages. These cannot be switched off, which is the correct behavior for a password reset.
- Site health warnings. If a page on your site breaks, we would rather tell you. This category will get considerably more useful once broken link logging is in place.
Our recommended setting
Email on for contact messages and site health. Everything else dashboard only. That produces roughly one email a month plus real enquiries, which is a volume you will keep reading.
Make sure the address is right
Worth two minutes: check which address these are going to. A surprising number of accounts point at an email from a previous life, and a contact form notification that lands in an inbox you closed in 2019 is indistinguishable from a contact form that does not work.
Your notification address and the address shown publicly on your site are separate settings, which we covered in the profile rebuild and again in contact details in one place. Our older piece on a professional email address is still the best short read on which address to use.
Counters follow the same rules
Anything set to dashboard only still counts toward the badge in your header, so switching off email does not mean losing track. The counters themselves were fixed separately, which we wrote up in notification counters that match.
Not set up yet? Create a free actor website and you will be asked about this during onboarding.
