I already set default digest email frequency to never but since this only applies to new accounts (it seems), our forum still sends out an insane amount of emails every week. I fear that many just see this is SPAM and checking through the digest history, the content really isn’t that useful at the moment. For that reason I want to suspend the digest email feature entirely. Is there a way to do this?

There really should be three states for this per user: a. no preference set (uses default setting from the forum) b. digest opt-out c. digest opt-in to have the forum setting only affect new users is counter-intuitive.

Remember the digest is only sent if the user is not seen on Discourse for the entire time period (a week, in this case) the digest tries to pick stuff from /top that is the most popular to share

According to my dashboard, our forum sent 28K emails in the last 30 days. Most of which seem to be the weekly digest emails. This is absurd. It simply doesn’t fit with our use case and I suspect that these emails did more damage than good.

Depends; you’d have to ask the users. If there are lots of drive-by users who don’t ever plan to come back to the community, then it makes sense to have a “never” or “monthly” mail digest default. There is an easy one-click unsubscribe on all emails we send, of course. Literally one click, none of this “click, fill out of a form, sign your name” nonsense.

I’m confident that not even a fraction of those mails get read by anyone. Finding and clicking a unsubscribe button still takes more effort than ignoring or hitting the SPAM button. Anyway, personal preference but I argue that a weekly digest mail by default is destructive. If I had noticed that turning the setting to never does not actually change existing users, I’d have corrected this ages ago.

To reduce the issue when I migrated one large forum from phpBB… I specifically ran a query setting the digest emails to never be sent to anybody who hasn’t logged into the old forum for the past 1 year. [image] pakl: I’m confident that not even a fraction of those mails get read by anyone Out of interest - How are you confident? For example I montior the open and click rates via Manadrill and I can see for that same Discourse install the following for the past 30 days just for digest emails: Avg Open rate - 38.4% Avg Click rate - 10.7%

[image] DeanMarkTaylor: I specifically ran a query setting the digest emails to never be sent to anybody who hasn’t logged into the old forum for the past 1 year. @pakl here’s a rails console command that should do that: User.where('last_seen_at < ?', 8.months.ago).update_all(email_digests: false)

I think we should add a site setting to suppress digest emails for users we have not seen on the site for more than (n) days, defaulting to 365. The goal of the digest is to get people to visit every so often, if it fails for a year, might as well stop trying until they do come back, if they ever do.

@techapj can you take this? I think it is important. We should avoid emailing people digests after a year if they never visit in that time period. Especially important as Discourse is getting traction out there and we have live sites > 1 year old.

Would it make more sense for email digests to be broken out as a plugin? Forum communities vary so widely on their email newsletter preferences, and breaking it out of core makes life easy for those who don’t want to offer digests, plus it actually gives more flexibility for those who do want digests. For example, on one of my forums, I run a daily digest opt-in, a weekly digest opt-out to active users, and a monthly digest opt-out to inactive users. Each of those digests is a different plugin from a third-party developer, so I can customize each one without affecting the others. I haven’t looked at the code, but I suspect it’s trivial to break it out of core–I mean it’s really just a cron job plus a few SQL queries and an email template. Perhaps the weekly digest is a default installed plugin? A “batteries included” part of Discourse that can be easily swapped out if the admin prefers a different newsletter plugin? Right now, with this integrated into core, I’d be a little hesitant to hack too much on customizing it to my site because every modification makes upgrades a little more painful. Just a thought…

Disable/suspend digest emails

Product Support

codinghorror (Jeff Atwood) January 26, 2015, 10:33pm 20

No, that’s a weird way to disable digest emails. We should make sure the site setting logic prevents it from being set to negative or zero though.

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Disable/suspend digest emails

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