I’m not concerned about admin messages, more of an “opt-out” of receiving them. Use case: A particular staff member has a tremendous email volume (she manages close to a thousand volunteers in local areas) so she asks that anyone who has questions direct them to her email. Obvious she can (and will) update her profile with “please email me rather than PM” but it would be more helpful to her if she can disable them entirely. There is no situation where she needs to receive PMs, she’s an actual staff member, not a Discourse staff member. I manage the forum side of things, she just replies directly in the forum if she needs to publicly, or privately if there’s a volunteer question. Is this something I can either turn off for her or a setting that she can toggle herself? It’s not worth development since she’s really the only person in our community this applies to, although many members might like to opt-out of general PMs if it’s a possibility.

She can opt-out of receiving PMs by heading to http://your.site.com/my/preferences/notifications and unticking this checkbox [PM0002] Once she saves that preference, non-staff members on the site will not be able to send her PMs. Instead they’ll see this error [PM0001] Other staff members will still be able to send her PMs.

Can users disable personal messages for themselves?

Product Support

Heather_Dudley (Heather Dudley) September 4, 2019, 8:13pm 3

Perfect, thank you! That’s exactly what I needed, I just couldn’t find it (and I swear, I looked at that three times.

Topic		Replies	Views
Disable personal messages on a per-user basis Product Support personal-messages	2	934	August 21, 2020
Allow users to disable new PMs Announcements new-feature , personal-messages	7	2035	March 7, 2023
Disable personal message between members Product Support personal-messages	2	278	July 21, 2025
How do I disable personal messages between members, but not admin to members? Product Support	8	1641	March 17, 2023
Stop accepting DMs Product Support	3	526	September 25, 2023

Can users disable personal messages for themselves?

Related topics