annabelhodges.com

I’ve seen quite a few people getting frustrated with the latest Google toy over the last 24/48 hours – principally because it is very noisy and it is right there in your inbox so very hard to ignore – especially with email notifications coming in on everything.

Google also haven’t made it very obvious how you can get rid of buzz if you don’t want it, or at the very least disable email notifications. I’m sure they will respond to demand for these fairly basic features in due course but for the moment these are the only easy options I’ve managed to find.

1) Switching Buzz off completely.
Scroll to the bottom of your gmail inbox and you will see a list of footer links at the bottom – one of which is the option to switch Buzz off.

2) Filtering out the email notifications sent by Buzz

So far at least, I haven’t seen an option to swith email notifications off… the only method I know of to at least not have to visible see the emails is to set up a filter so that these are auto-archived – ie. they still exist in your inbox, you just don’t see them unless you do a search on them.

• Create a new filter
• Choose search criteria as: Has the words: is:buzz (It may give you a warning to not to use this – ignore it!)
• Choose action as: Skip the inbox (Archive it)
• Choose action: Apply the label: Buzz From (or whatever you want to call it)
• Create filter.

Email Notification filter – Step 1

Email Notification filter – Step 2

I like to use the label becuase it allows you to quickly access everything you’ve auto-archived, just in case you did want to see it all.

Apologies for the  ‘idiot’s guide to’ approach but seems there are quite a few people getting a tad irate with the amount of noise Buzz has been adding to their inbox who’ve never set up a gmail filter before.