I’m in a similar situation, and after doing some research and thinking, I’ve concluded that this is not Discourse’s problem. So here’s a workaround.
Two very important caveats
- There could be a law against this type of mass sending, depending on where you’re sending to/from.
- If you follow bad practices, you risk having your sender address (possibly even your root domain; I don’t know exactly how these things work) marked as spam by major services like Gmail.
Personally I don’t see an issue with sending out an e-mail to users who signed their e-mail up to the equivalent of a mailing list, as long as the opt-out is prominent and super simple.
How to do mass sendouts with your Discourse userbase
There are many ways to do this. I will list two that I would consider reasonably safe.
Method 1
Export users from Discourse (Admin → Users → Export) and import the CSV file into Mailchimp/Sendy or Sendyhosting (a more affordable option I came upon recently).
Method 2
Sync users with WordrPress and use one of its Newsletter Plugins.
If you’d like to method #1 every year or so when you have a major round-up announcement to make, you could just export and import again, since any good newsletter service will ignore duplicates and track opt-out users for you.
Longer term, a far more desirable solution would be this: