Tiny Simple Admin Notice Silencer

WordPress emails the site admin about almost everything it does. A plugin auto-updated, or failed to. Someone registered. A comment is waiting for moderation. A privacy request got confirmed. On a busy site that’s a steady stream of near-identical mail, and the few messages that matter get buried in it.

I built Tiny Simple Admin Notice Silencer to switch that off. Activate it and the admin notifications stop. There’s nothing to configure – no settings page, no options, no admin menu.

What it silences

• Automatic updates – plugin, theme and core auto-update result emails, the “a new WordPress version is available” notice, and the auto-update debug dump.
• Accounts – the “New User Registration” and “Password Lost and Changed” notices sent to the admin, plus the notice that the site admin address changed.
• Comments – comment moderation requests, and “new comment on your post” notices when the admin wrote the post.
• Privacy requests – the “a request was confirmed” notice sent to the admin.
• WP Mail SMTP – the weekly “Email Summary” digest, if you have that plugin installed.

What it leaves alone, on purpose

• Recovery Mode – when a fatal error takes your site down, WordPress emails you a recovery link. That’s the one notification you always want, so the plugin doesn’t touch it.
• Emails your users get – welcome emails for new users, password-reset links, password and email change confirmations sent to the account holder, privacy confirmations sent to whoever asked, order and form mail from other plugins. All of it still goes out.
• wp_mail() itself – there’s no global off switch. Nothing gets intercepted, redirected or dropped.

One detail worth knowing. Notices like “your password was changed” or “someone commented on your post” go to the account holder, who isn’t always the admin. If I silenced them for everyone, every member would lose their warning that someone took over their account. So the plugin only suppresses them when the account holder is the admin. Your users keep their security mail and your inbox gets quiet.

For developers: six filters

You can switch each group back on separately, and add more addresses to the admin list, from a small plugin or mu-plugin.

Where you put add_filter matters. The plugin reads the five group filters once, on plugins_loaded. If you register a callback after that – in a theme’s functions.php, on init, or on plugins_loaded at a priority above 10 – it never runs and nothing tells you. Put group opt-outs in an mu-plugin or at the top level of a plugin file. tsans_admin_addresses doesn’t have this problem, because it’s read each time a notice is checked.

// Keep comment notifications flowing to the admin.
add_filter( 'tsans_disable_comment_emails', '__return_false' );

// Treat these addresses as "the admin" too, so their own
// account notices are silenced as well.
add_filter( 'tsans_admin_addresses', function ( $addresses ) {
    $addresses[] = 'editor@example.com';
    return $addresses;
} );

• tsans_disable_update_emails – the five automatic-update gates (default true).
• tsans_disable_account_emails – account notices sent to the admin (default true).
• tsans_disable_comment_emails – comment moderation and notices on the admin’s own posts (default true).
• tsans_disable_privacy_emails – the privacy-request confirmation sent to the admin (default true).
• tsans_disable_third_party_emails – the WP Mail SMTP weekly summary (default true).
• tsans_admin_addresses – array of addresses treated as “the admin”. Default is array( get_option( 'admin_email' ) ). A single string works too, and the match ignores case.

From the maker of WP Multi Tool

This plugin is built by the same developer behind WP Multi Tool — the Swiss Army knife for WordPress developers and site administrators. If you manage multiple WordPress sites, check it out.