WordPress sends two types of email notifications for comments by default. The first goes to the post author whenever a new comment on their post is approved. The second goes to the site administrator when a comment is held for moderation. On active blogs or high-traffic sites, these notifications can generate dozens or hundreds of emails per day, most of which are either spam caught by moderation or legitimate comments that don’t require any action from the author beyond the moderation queue.
Disabling these notifications is a one-liner for each, and the change is immediately effective with no side effects on comment functionality itself.
The Code
Add this to your functions.php or a site-specific plugin. The two filters, notify_post_author and notify_moderator, control each notification type independently, so you can disable one without affecting the other.
notify_post_author
This filter controls whether the author of the post receives an email when a new comment on their post is published. Setting it to __return_false stops those notifications entirely. Authors who want to stay on top of discussion can check their comments directly from the admin dashboard or use the comment moderation view, which is generally a more efficient workflow than responding to individual email alerts.
notify_moderator
This filter controls whether the site administrator receives a moderation notification when a comment is caught in the moderation queue. On sites with active spam, which is most sites, this notification is typically more noise than signal, since the vast majority of moderated comments are spam. Disabling it means the admin checks the moderation queue on their own schedule rather than being alerted per comment.
Selective Disabling
Both filters receive the post ID as a parameter, which allows for conditional logic. If you want to keep notifications active for a specific post type but disable them for others, replace __return_false with a callback that checks the post type:
This pattern lets you keep notifications for pages (where comments might be meaningful feedback) while disabling them for high-volume blog posts.
New User Comment Subscriptions
These filters don’t affect the “Notify me of new comments via email” checkbox that appears in the comment form for visitors. That subscription system, which emails commenters when new replies are posted, is separate and typically managed by a plugin like Subscribe to Comments Reloaded. The filters in this snippet only affect notifications to administrators and post authors, not to commenter subscribers.
Alternative: Update Settings Programmatically
WordPress also exposes comment notification settings in Settings → Discussion. The “Email me whenever” checkboxes there control the same behaviour for administrators. The filter approach in this snippet is preferable for code-managed sites because it can’t be accidentally toggled by a client browsing the settings page.
// Disable notification to the post author when a comment is approved
add_filter( 'notify_post_author', '__return_false' );
// Disable notification to the admin when a new comment is awaiting moderation
add_filter( 'notify_moderator', '__return_false' );