Yes, Discourse has some email settings that you can use to set default values for your user’s email preferences. These default values can still be overridden by users on their preferences page. You can find the default settings by going to your Admin / Settings page and entering default email into the search box. The setting that you should check are:
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default email level: This setting has a default value of “only when away.” If you would like users to receive email notifications for activity that occurs in regular topics even when the user has visited the forum when the notification was created, change this setting to “always.” -
default email messages level: This setting has a default value of “always.” This means that by default, users will alway be sent an email when a PM is sent directly to them.
When you change and save either of the above settings, a modal window will open asking you if you would like to apply the change historically. Select Yes to apply the change to all existing users on your site.
You will see that there is also a default email mailing list mode site setting. Enabling this setting will set the email preference for all new users on your site to “Mailing list mode.” This default setting does not have an option to apply the change historically. Enabling mailing list mode for all users on a site can cause a huge number of unwanted emails to be sent, so the setting should be enabled with caution.