I'm personally thankful for the email notifications, because it keeps me from having to remember each and every thread I'm following and the possibility of missing something of interest. And it save years of wear and tear on my refresh button.
Another feature I love is the auto login. On proboard forums, those crappy free host boards, you have to login manually, and then go back to your email and follow the link again to get "credit" for visiting the thread. This sucks because if you follow the link in the notification without logging in, you will not receive another email until you visit that post while logged in. It took me awhile to figure this out and I thought my threads were not getting any posts, then when I looked in on them for shits and giggles, I had pages of stuff to catch up on.
I can see how it may annoy people, but it's one of the things I cherish in a forum and have actually abandoned forums that didn't use it, because I couldn't keep up unless I wanted to spend massive amounts of time chasing down new posts. 99% of the time the notifications can be requested/denied in the profile edit section, and other's are checkable when you reply to a post. Every forum is diff, but they are there somewhere
Re: Annoying Emails! 
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