I'm not too worried about private messages - we don't have a problem with those. At least for now. I did set that user_email_watchlists to zero and have verified it is zero. I'll go digging through the code and find a way to simply hard code outgoing forum update emails not to happen.
I agree the 'turn off update emails' should be a global setting. As the owner of the forum, and the person who is going to get slammed and penalized for the emails going out, I should be able to prevent those from sending. It impacts not only my forum email but all of my editors' actual newsletters they try to send. If Gmail or someone triggers a block on us it blocks ALL of our outgoing email which becomes a huge problem.
