superfluous email notifications being sent out by videolist? (issue with view counters / ajax likes)

for a long while i have been receiving spurious emails from my site about videos held by videolist (elgg 1.8.18 version) when they should not be sent out.

i discovered that both of the view counter plugins (coldtrick's - https://github.com/ColdTrick/entity_view_counter and also matt's - http://community.elgg.org/plugins/872625/1.1/views-counter-18x) were triggering the messages every time the video was viewed. so i have disabled them for now.

i looked through the code briefly and got feedback from the coders - they pointed me back to videolist and i didn't see any obvious causes in the code for the view counter plugins.

today i just enabled etlikes (http://community.elgg.org/plugins/1161358/1.1/easytalkee-ajax-likes - ajax likes) plugin and the same issue occurred again when i liked a video in the river. (actually i didn't receive the notification but i immediately got an 'email undeliberable' notification from another user's hotmail account that had been sent a notification that i liked this video - even though there was no proper reason for that mail to be sent out.

so.. there is some type of bug somewhere either in core or in videolist that is triggering emails incorrectly (or possibly in some other notification plugin i am using).

does anyone have any thoughts on the cause of this?

coldtrick advised me to use this version of videolist to test: https://github.com/Pleio/videolist

i haven't done that yet and do not know what the possible fix is that may be in it.

thanks