Configuring Activity Summary emails

[Discourse]

This guide explains how to configure and manage activity summary emails in Discourse, including user and admin options, customization, and troubleshooting.

Required user level: Administrator

Activity summary emails (formerly known as digest emails) are automated messages sent to forum members who haven’t visited in a specific period. These emails contain a collection of popular content since the user’s last visit, aiming to re-engage inactive members.

Understanding activity summary emails

Activity summary emails include:

1. Activity statistics to emphasize engagement levels
2. A list of popular topics
3. A selection of popular posts
4. Links to topics that are “New for you”

Here’s an example of what an activity summary email looks like:

The system sends these emails only when a member hasn’t visited the forum or received an email from the forum for a minimum period.

Configuring user options

Users can customize their activity summary email preferences:

1. Go to user preferences
2. Navigate to the “Emails” tab
3. Adjust the “Activity Summary” frequency

Available frequency options are:

• Never
• Every 30 minutes
• Every hour
• Daily
• Weekly
• Every month
• Every six months

The system won’t send activity summaries to silenced or suspended members.

Setting up admin options

Default user settings

To configure default settings for new users:

1. Go to Admin / Settings
2. Search for “digest”
3. Adjust the following settings:
   • default email digest frequency
   • default include tl0 in digests

Here’s what these settings look like in the admin panel:

Site settings

To customize activity summary emails:

1. Go to Admin / Settings
2. Search for “digest”
3. Modify the following settings as needed:
   • digest logo url
   • digest min excerpt length
   • digest topics
   • digest posts
   • digest other topics
   • suppress digest email after days
   • digest suppress categories
   • show topic featured link in digest
   • disable digest emails

Customizing email appearance

To customize the email’s appearance:

1. Go to Admin / Settings
2. Adjust the following settings:
   • email accent bg color
   • email accent fg color

For more advanced customization, refer to the guide on customizing email templates.

Adding custom content

To add custom text to activity summary emails:

1. Go to Admin / Customize / Text Content
2. Search for user_notifications.digest.custom
3. Edit the desired customization keys

Understanding the list of popular topics

Popular topics for digests are extracted from /top topics with certain rules:

• individual user permissions to view that topic
  • topics from private categories the user does not have access to will not be sent
• topic notification level
  • the topic shouldn’t be muted for that user
• user who created that topic must have trust level greater than 0
  • this default can be overridden (see below)
• topic must be created after the user was last emailed
• topic should not be from a muted category
• topic should not be closed
• topic should not be archived

Testing activity summary emails

To preview an activity summary email:

1. Go to Admin / Emails
2. Click on “Preview Summary”
3. Set the Last Seen User date
4. Enter a username to use for the summary email.
5. Choose to view on-site or send to an email address

Here’s what the preview option looks like in the admin panel:

Note that for the summary email to populate, it will need to contain at least some activity since the last seen user date, so you may need to set this date back several weeks if your site does not have a lot of activity.

Troubleshooting

A user might not receive activity summary emails if:

• They have been active on the site recently
• They have unsubscribed from activity summary emails
• A summary has been sent recently
• Their email has been bouncing
• They’re inactive, suspended, or staged
• They were created via sync_sso and have never visited the forum

Checking email sending dates

To check when an email was last sent to a user:

• Check the last_emailed_at column in the users table
• Check the digest_attempted_at column in the user_stats table

Frequestly asked questions

Is there a place to see statistics or a report of the amount of e-mails sent?

You can see the list of sent emails from your site’s Admin / Emails / Sent page. You can see the total number of emails sent per day with the Emails Sent dashboard report (found by clicking the Reports link from your admin dashboard.)

For a detailed report of emails sent per type of email, you can query the email_logs table with the Data Explorer plugin.

For self hosted sites, you can also usually see reports at your transactional mail provider, which will also include delivery status, bounces, etc.

What are the technical requirements and the costs associated with sending email to forum members?

For self hosted sites, an account with a transactional email provider like Sendgrid needed. Take a look at the email provider recommendations.

Email delivery is included with all of our hosting plans. If you go with our hosting, everything to do with sending and receiving emails on your Discourse site is configured for you.

Additional resources

• Managing Activity Summary email subscriptions
• Customizing the Discourse outer email template
• Adding custom content to summary emails

Last edited by @SaraDev 2025-06-11T20:46:13Z

Last checked by @hugh 2024-08-02T04:11:44Z

Check document

Perform check on document:

[bayardo.rivas]

I have configured a couples of Categories and I have a Group with granted permissions for those categories. I would like that members of those groups receive notifications and mails digest/recap only from the activities (post/replies) from these specific categories. At this time, user receive notifications of activities from other Categories.

Thanks for any advice.

[Moin]

@Discourse

The system sends these emails only when a member hasn’t visited the forum or received an email from the forum for a minimum period.

I think this was changed in Activity Summary not sent if other emails are sent - #25 by zogstrip

@Discourse

Adding custom content

To add custom text to activity summary emails:

1. Go to Admin / Customize / Text Content

This instruction wouldn’t help me to navigate to /admin/customize/site_texts. “Text Content” seems to be neither in the URL, nor in the admin sidebar, nor in the old admin menu.

[bayardo.rivas]

I still don’t understand how to configure Activity Summary emails. I would like to send the email to users by group. For example, I have Category-A and Category-B, I have GroupA and GroupB with granted permissions in Category-A and Category-B respectively. My ideal email summary is that users from GroupA receive summary only for activities and post in Category-A and the same for users in GroupB.

[tobiaseigen]

@bayardo.rivas

My ideal email summary is that users from GroupA receive summary only for activities and post in Category-A and the same for users in GroupB.

Is this not what is happening on your site? Does it look different than this?

[ToddZ]

@Moin

@Discourse

The system sends these emails only when a member hasn’t visited the forum or received an email from the forum for a minimum period.

I think this was changed in Activity Summary not sent if other emails are sent - #25 by zogstrip

Yes, that bit should be updated, as it was agreed that “receiving a notification shouldn’t count as a visit that would prevent you from receiving an activity summary email” and a fix was implemented to address this.

[tknospdr (David Muszynski)]

I’m just looking for some clarity here.
As you have to put in a user in order to see a summary preview on the site, I’m guessing that Discourse is already smart enough to know not to send topics from a specific category to a user if they don’t have access to that category, right?

So the only reason to add categories to the setting of ‘Digest suppress categories’ is if you never want ANY topics from this category going to ANYONE, right?