Some time ago, I was surprised that even after more than a day, I had not received an email notification for my unread DM in chat. In my chat preferences, the option for email notifications for chat messages is enabled.
If I understand the code correctly, I have found the reason. I think the relevant line is:
To my understanding, this means that notifications about chat messages are only sent if ‘Email me when I am quoted, replied to, my @username is mentioned, or when there is new activity in my watched categories, tags or topics’ in the general email preferences is not set to never.
But mine is set to never, because I don’t want every reply to one of my posts to spam my inbox.
What surprised me about this connection is the fact that I can also receive notifications for PMs without activating emails in general. That’s why I assumed that this would work the same way for chat notifications. For me, a DM is just as important as a PM.
I think it would be great if these settings were independent of each other, so that I can receive chat notifications without also receiving emails for every reply.
If this is to remain the case, perhaps the chat email preference should at least be set to ‘never’ and non-changeable if the user has deactivated the general email preference. At the moment, this connection is not apparent. The fact that I can set up email notifications for chat implied to me that I would then also receive them.