Migrating old forum to Discourse - concern about digest mails

Product Support Migration

AI-generated summary

In a discussion about migrating an old forum to Discourse, mbajur expressed concern that after importing 12,869 users, Discourse might send weekly digest emails to all of them — including long-inactive users — potentially wasting Mandrill email limits. They specifically asked if there’s a “last active at” threshold to limit digests to recently active users. featheredtoast replied that the setting delete digest email after days (default: 365 days) suppresses digests for users inactive beyond that period. pfaffman suggested additionally disabling summary emails for all users or deactivating users to require email validation, preventing emails from being sent to invalid or abandoned addresses. mbajur thanked them, confirming this was exactly the solution they needed.

1

That’s a post extracted from one of my posts posted in phpbb import script topic. It was ignored there so i decided to create a separate topic for it cause i think it might be pretty interesting to someone.

Here is the thing. My forum has 12869 users. I know that discourse sends a digest mails for users that was not online for some time. Does it mean that, after turning discourse/sidekiq on after import, it will send 12k digest mails to everyone each week? Or is there any “last active at” limit for user digests (i mean, user will receive digest only if he was active in less than, say, 2 months) ?

The thing is that forum was pretty active some time ago but it died a bit (mainly because of using a phpbb hehe) so the user base is huge but there are not so many active users right now. I don’t want to waste my money and mandrill usage limits just to send digest to users that was not online since 2006.

Thanks in advance!

2

You’re looking for the delete digest email after days config setting:

Suppress summary emails for users not seen on the site for more than (n) days.

The default at this time is 1 year (365 days).

3

You definitely want to consider setting Disable summary emails for all users.

You could also deactivate all users (so that they must validate their email address). This would ensure that you’re not sending mail to the ether.

4

Great! Thank you so much, that’s exactly what i was looking for :slight_smile: