When importing a large number of users into Discourse, it’s uncertain what kinds of automated emails will be sent and in what quantities. 007 is concerned that imported users might automatically start receiving daily digests, resulting in a large number of emails being sent.
Stephen recommends turning off email for users during the import process to avoid unnecessary emails. He suggests using a tool like MailHog to intercept and view outbound emails without sending them.
After a successful import, 007 wonders what happens when email is turned back on. Stephen explains that users with valid emails will start receiving weekly digests, but the suppress digest email after days setting can be adjusted to control this behavior. The default setting is 365 days.
I’m working on an import on a forum with tens of thousands of members. Many of these members don’t need to be imported due to being tire kicker or spammer accounts, but many are valid too.
Since Discourse has daily emails and all types of other emails that are sent through Mailgun, I’d like to have a better idea of what kinds of emails will suddenly start to be sent through Mailgun and at what quantities.
For every 1,000 users I import, will their settings be automatically set to receive the daily digests, for example? Will that mean 1,000 emails a day minimum to both active and inactive users?
Granted, there’s an unsubscribe button, and Mailgun will auto suppress bounced emails (and I believe email marked as spam, but I’m not sure on that one).
Who else did an import with a larger member base? What kind of email numbers did you start to see in the days and weeks post import?
When importing I would recommend turning off email for your users entirely. You can’t be sure that the import is going to be successful, and your users don’t need to know about the instance until everything is polished and ready to roll.
You can either configure disable emails to non-staff, or temporarily swap your mailgun settings for a copy of mailhog. Mailhog can simply intercept all outbound email, letting you see what will be sent without actually sending it.
In terms of email volumes, the activity summary is only daily for the first 50 registered users while bootstrap mode enabled, normally it’s weekly. You can disable bootstrap mode via /admin and AFAIK it won’t apply to imports anyhow.