Click the “Account & Lists” button in the upper-right corner of the page, and sign in if you haven’t done so already. Click the “Your Account” item on the dropdown list.
Step Two: Configure Your Communication Preferences
The first thing we’ll do, now that we’ve arrived on the account page, is to configure a few communication preferences. These preferences include things like whether you get any promotional material through physical mail, how you want emails you do receive formatted, and the types of categories for which you do or don’t want to see promotional emails.
On your account page, look for the “Email, alerts, messages, and ads” section, and then click the “Communication preferences” link. To make things even quicker, you can just head straight to the Communications Preferences page with this link (you’ll be asked to sign in if you’re not already).
This page has three settings groups: Marketing Information by Post, General Settings, and Promotional Emails. Let’s take them one by one.
Next, expand the “General Settings” section. Again, there is only one setting here, and it controls how the email you do get is formatted: HTML (with text and images) or plain text (no images). Make your selection, and then click the “Update” button.
Next, expand the “Promotional Emails” section. This is what you’re really looking for. You’ll find In this area are dozens of different categories that, when enabled, indicate that you want to receive promotional marketing emails relating to that specific department. You can enable as many or as few as you like.
And if you don’t want any marketing email at all, you don’t have to uncheck every box individually. Instead, select the “Do not send me any marketing email for now” option at the bottom of the list. When you’ve made your selections, click the “Update” button to enable the changes.
Step Three: Configure Your Email Subscriptions
Back on the main “Your Account” page, under that same “Email alerts, messages, and ads” section, click the “Email” link.
This page shows the email subscriptions in which you’re currently enrolled.
By default, you should see all of your enabled subscriptions under the “Current Subscriptions” list. Turn off the switch on the far right for whatever you don’t want to receive—you should see the entry in the “Frequency” column change briefly to an “Unsubscribed” confirmation message.
To find these types of messages, head once again back to the main “Your Account” page. This time, click the “Message center” link.
Head to your email service of choice—I’ll use my Gmail account as an example. What you’re going to do is set up a spam filter that stops the unnecessary emails from third-party sellers from reaching your inbox while still allowing practical emails, like shipping notifications. For Gmail, you can manually add a filter by clicking the gear button in the upper-right, and then clicking the “Settings” option. On the Settings page, click the “Filters and blocked addresses” link.
On that page, click the “Create a new filter” link. In the window that pops up, type “marketplace.amazon.com” into the “Has the words” field. Don’t use the “From” field, since that will only search for full email addresses. Next, click the “create filter with this search” link.
Select the “Mark as read” to have the messages still appear in your inbox, but get marked as read Select the “Skip the Inbox (Archive it)” option, and you’ll never see the incoming message. It will be there if you search for it though. Select the “Apply the label” option (and select a label) to automatically categorize those messages. Use a combination of these options. For example, you could apply a label and mark the messages as read.
Just note that the rules you set up apply to all messages from the marketplace. This diminishes your ability to react quickly on the occasion that sellers have a legitimate need to contact you, like a product recall.
The above instructions are for Gmail, but you should be able to replicate the spam filter with similar steps in almost any email service or program.
Image credit: Shutterstock/hanss
