Chances are very good that, in 2017, you have encountered a merchant that uses the Square payment system (often presented on an iPad that swivels around so that you can sign the check, include a tip, etc.). Square is very popular in coffee shops and fast food places. And, if you have ever paid through the Square system, you may be wondering how to change or remove your email address from the Square system.

First, here’s how Square got your email address in the first place: at some point in time, somewhere, you used your credit card to pay for something, and it got swiped through the Square reader. Then you were asked whether you wanted your receipt emailed to you. At some point upon completing some transaction via Square, you said “yes” to having an emailed receipt, and into Square’s database your email address went. (For a more detailed explanation of that process read How the Heck did Square Get My Email Address.)

On Square’s end, that email address is associated with the credit card that you used. So every time you use that credit card with a merchant who uses Square, it sends a receipt to that email address unless you tell it specifically to not send an emailed receipt.

Now, you might think that in order to change that email address, you would need to log in to the Square website, into your account.

Except, unless you yourself are a merchant, it’s very unlikely that you actually have a Square account. And, in fact, you don’t need one to change your email address.

Here’s how:

How to Remove or Change Your Email Address with Square

In order to change your email address (or remove it) you will need one of the emailed Square receipts. Once you have that, scroll down to the bottom, where you will see:

 

At this point you may be thinking that ‘Manage preferences’ would be the place to change or remove your email address, but you would be wrong.

Instead, click on ‘Not your receipt?’ Yes, it’s not intuitive, because it is your receipt, you just don’t want them using the email address to which they sent it. But trust us, click on ‘Not your receipt?’

 

This will immediately bring you to this page:

Now click on ‘Unlink Your Email’. What this does is uncouples, or disassociates, your email address from your credit card number.

 

If your goal is simply to remove your email address, then you are done. Note that we have no idea whether Square actually completely removes your email address from their system, or whether they just decouple it from your credit card. Either way, you will no longer receive email from Square.

If your goal is to change your email address with Square, rather than to completely remove it, you need to take one additional step:

The next time you pay for something with a merchant who uses Square, it will prompt you again to add your email address (because you removed the one that was associated with your credit card).

This time, put the new email address in, and it will become the email address associated with your credit card. We recommend that you use a tagged email address for this purpose (if you aren’t sure how to do that, read our article Track Who is Sharing Your Email Address by Using Tagged Addresses).