Hi Owen - this will happen is someone is following you and has their notifications settings set to notify them when someone they follow creates a new route. There are two options to cancel this - delete them from your followers (click the FOLLOWERS tab on your home page and then the trash can symbol), or they can change their account settings to turn off these notications (under My Account on the menus).
When i save a new route it gets emailed to a random friend of mine - can i turn this off please?
If you want to share Private routes you would need follow the instructions in the following guide: https://www.plotaroute.com/tip/12/how-to-share-private-routes-with-only-selected-people
We don't have any way of sharing lists of Private routes on the site though, so you would need to separately send a list of links to the person you are sharing the routes with.
Whats the easest way to share Private routes
as in more than one ata a timeplease.