Some of the links on this forum allow SMF, at no cost to you, to earn a small commission when you click through and make a purchase. Let me know if you have any questions about this.
The preferences are for watched threads then under watched forums it has notifications for either new threads or messages by alerts or email or both. I have my watched forums marked for alert and email notifications for new threads. So when I go to SMF site I look at my alert icon to see if it's red and read my unread watched threads then go under my watched forums and see if any forum is in bold brown, meaning I have unread posts in that forum but do not get notifications for them only with new threads.
This way no matter how many SMF emails I get I click on one to get to the site and delete the other unread SMF emails. I don't have excessive emails just one per thread no matter if there's one post or several.
-Kurt