I give up

Tanja, none of us have any control over who these public messages go to. They apparently go to EVERYONE!

Michael,
Enjoy your book. Perhaps the computer gremlins will be gone when you log in tomorrow.
Tanja, a public message goes to all our collaborators, friend groups and family groups. If a topic comes up that you don't want keep getting messages about, you can select "unfollow" at the top of the page. I have done that to several conversations when they didn't relate to me.

Happy ancestor hunting, everyone!
Maria

If you don't want the message click the link "unfollow this thread" and follow the directions and you wil not get the messages for that discussion any more

Michael, if you are in a long list of merges, after you press the "merge" or "request to merge" button, and finish that operation, it moves to the next profile on the right and asks if you want to merge that. And once you've reached the last profile, it loops back to the beginning, rather than leaving the page.

This can be confusing.

When I want to leave such a merge stack, I usually go to the top left corner and hit "Home" to get to my Geni home page, or simply close the tab.

If that doesn't work, file a ticket with Geni!

Tanja,
if you prefer to NOT get emails about discussions in general, you can specifically disable them by going here, and change the settings. Personally, I have cleared all of the Weekly and Daily emails, and left only the third group which are personally relevant.

http://www.geni.com/account_settings/notifications

To prevent emails regarding every single comment in a Discussion, disable the option near the bottom where it says: comments in my tree discussion

Hope that helps reduce the overload.

@Shmuel you said, "To prevent emails regarding every single comment in a Discussion, disable the option near the bottom where it says: comments in my tree discussion"

Wouldn't this also stop notifications of Family Discussions??

Angus, yes it would.
Personally I'm online (and on Geni) almost every day. Those emails do NOT contain any actual content. They don't even link to the actual new message. So I find them pretty useless...