According to the Suspended user section of Description of various user states in Discourse, emails initiated by staff members are sent to suspended users. The purpose of this is to allow staff to have a channel of communication with suspended users.
I can see how being unaware of this bahaviour could lead to an awkward situation. Ideally, the admins on your site would have used whisper posts for your internal communication. Whispers posts do not create notifications for non-staff users.
If you only seen what we wrote The client was super, super pissed.
Anyway, yes, we do use the whisper feature, too much in fact. But that particular time we thought we were clear. In fact, we use the whisper so much that I am thinking about modding it a tad via a plugin, as I find that:
For someone who whispers a lot (most our admins do due to the nature of our site), we find it cumbersome to click two times to get to the option.
Quite often admins become so numb to the feature (routine?) that they forget to turn whisper on. I plan to change the button to a different color (the submit button) once Whisper is picked. It’s easy to forget yourself (that Whisper isn’t on when replying) and then look like crazies when our members see these messages.
Another thing to note, there is an extra class composing-whisper applied when you toggle it on, so you could make the preview more obvious too if you want.
Currently it does apply font-style: italic; to the preview but you could also add something to make it even more super obvious like:
Awesome, thanks! Will try this out. That’s what I wanted. Staring at the site for countless hours a day it’s hard to notice when Whisper is on, IMO Discourse needs to make it more obvious.