Today, I received an email from my server, notifying me of an updated version of Piwik being available. That's nice I thought, but the thing is that I never received such an email before, and I couldn't recall seeing any setting in Piwik's UI for configuring the same!

After a bit of searching around the net, I found that this setting was probably added with Piwik 2.4.0, at least that's when I started getting the notifications.

Anyway, if you don't want Piwik to send update notification emails for whatever reason, you can follow the given instructions.

Disabling all (core + plugins) update notification emails

By default, update notification emails are only enabled for Piwik's core, i.e., the main installation, and disabled for the plugins.

To disable updates to the Piwik core as well, you need to edit the config.ini.php file, present under the config directory of your Piwik installation.

To do so, put the following in that file:

[General]
enable_update_communication = 0

You can omit the [General] part if it's already present in your config file. Just be sure to put the option under the [General] section.

Note: Apart from disabling all types of update notification emails, the above option will also remove the plugin update notification email related settings from Piwik's UI.

Managing plugin update notification emails

To enable update notification emails for the plugins (since they are disabled by default), there is an option available through Piwik's UI.

Open Settings -> General settings. In the Update settings section, change the Send me an email notification when there is a new plugin update option to Yes.

Note: As mentioned previously, if you set:

enable_update_communication = 0

the above option will not be available through the UI, and the plugin updates will be disabled as well.