Open your own page on Badoo, tap the Safety tab, then Control your experience. There you choose whether everyone can message you or only people you have liked, and you can change the setting back whenever you want.

Where the setting lives

Go to your profile page and tap the Safety tab. Inside it, tap Control your experience.

The messaging choice is right there: let everyone message you, or only the people you have liked. Nothing is permanent, so you can try one option for a week and switch back if you do not like it.

What each option does

With everyone allowed, any member can start a conversation with you, whether or not you have shown interest in her.

With only people you have liked, the door narrows. A woman can only write to you if you have already liked her. Anyone you have not liked cannot start a chat.

What limiting it costs a man

This setting is most useful to someone with an overflowing inbox, and for most men that is not the problem.

Think about what limiting it to people you have liked actually blocks. It blocks every woman who came across you, liked what she saw, and decided to write first. Those are some of the best conversations you will ever get on an app, because she chose you before you chose her. Turning them away to keep your inbox tidy is a bad trade if your inbox was not full to begin with.

a dating coach puts a lot of weight on picking who you talk to yourself. But picking works both ways, and it means staying reachable by the women who would pick you.

When limiting makes sense

There are real reasons to switch it.

The main one is junk. coach names fake accounts and bots as one of the standing irritations of the apps. Some inboxes fill with accounts that look fake, send links, or push you to talk somewhere else before you know anything about them. If that is most of what reaches you, limiting messages to people you have liked clears it out. The women you liked can still reach you.

It also helps if you are getting messages from someone you do not want to hear from, and would rather not deal with each one. And some men simply prefer to start every conversation themselves. That is a fair choice, as long as you know what it costs.

Look at what arrives before you decide

Do not change the setting on a hunch. Look at the last couple of weeks of messages that came in before you had liked the sender.

A quick way to judge is to count. Of the last ten women who wrote to you first, how many looked real, lived nearby, and were someone you might actually meet? If the answer is most of them, leaving the door open is paying off.

If they are mostly real women, some of them your type, leave it open. You do not have to answer all of them. Reply to the ones you like and ignore the rest.

If they are mostly junk, switch it and see whether the app feels better. You can always change it back. And whatever the setting, report any account that breaks the rules rather than just ignoring it.

Answering a woman who wrote first

If you leave the setting open, some women will start the conversation. Handle those chats well, because they are some of the warmest you will get.

Reply reasonably soon. You do not need to answer within seconds, but a woman who wrote first and hears nothing for three days may well have moved on. Match her energy. If she sent a short, playful line, send one back. If she asked a real question, answer it and ask her something in return.

And do not treat her first message as the finish line. She showed interest, which is a good start, not a promise. Keep it light, keep it moving, and suggest talking off the app within a handful of messages, the same as you would with any woman you wrote to first.

The messages that matter are the ones you send

This setting controls who can write to you. Your results mostly come from what you write to them.

My openers are short and specific. He picks one detail she shared and makes a light line out of it, without agonizing over the wording. A flat "hey" gets ignored, and a paragraph reads like homework.

After that, every message has a purpose, and the purpose is getting closer to her number and a plan. He does not let a good chat wander for days on the app. Get that part right, and the question of who can message you matters a lot less.