# Daily limits for outgoing mails per user
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/daily-limits-for-outgoing-mails-per-user/41458
**Category:** Feature
**Tags:** feedback
**Created:** [March 23, 2016, 4:37am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/daily-limits-for-outgoing-mails-per-user/41458 "2016-03-23T04:37:30Z")
**Posts on this page:** 17
**Page:** 2
### Author:  [@peternlewis](https://meta.discourse.org/u/peternlewis)
#### Post date: [March 25, 2016, 2:42am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/daily-limits-for-outgoing-mails-per-user/41458/21 "2016-03-25T02:42:10Z")
Yes, and I’m fine with that - I just wanted to make sure that you realized while doing this work on limiting and minimizing email sending that for some of us, the “mailing list mode” is an essential, even central, feature to our use of Discourse.
---
### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [March 25, 2016, 2:53am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/daily-limits-for-outgoing-mails-per-user/41458/22 "2016-03-25T02:53:37Z")
It is but it is also like a nuclear bomb. Very useful to solve extremely narrow specialized “problems” and a tremendous danger to the very future of humanity in all other situations 😉
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### Author:  [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### Post date: [March 25, 2016, 3:42am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/daily-limits-for-outgoing-mails-per-user/41458/23 "2016-03-25T03:42:46Z")
I think that is overstating it, having a copy of a small forum on your phone at all times has plenty of advantages, however for this to be useful
- you have to be a power user that is capable of creating email rules
- forum needs to be not too big, has to be of the scale that is easily digestible daily in one sitting
- requires a higher level of commitment, cause it’s harder for you to decipher stuff you want to interact with over passive content (was I mentioned or replied to ?)
Watching a category in a high volume site is pretty much equivalent to mailing list mode on a medium sized site. Watching a category is actually way worse than mailing list mode, if you want to stop the mail in mailing list mode you untick a box. To stop the mail when watching a category you have to hunt down all the watched topics and change them to default one by one, a process that can involve hundreds of clicks.
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### Author:  [@peternlewis](https://meta.discourse.org/u/peternlewis)
#### Post date: [March 25, 2016, 4:18am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/daily-limits-for-outgoing-mails-per-user/41458/24 "2016-03-25T04:18:09Z")
I completely agree that turning on the mailing list mode preference should check the average daily post count, and if its more than a couple, should either warn you (say if its up to ten per day) or alert you and make you confirm that is what you want to do if it is 10+/day.
And even before that, in the actual preference it would be good to say:
- Send me an email for every new post (unless I mute the topic or category) (currently 27 messages per day)
The same is true for watching a category or topic - warning or alerting the user if the volume will be substantial - its more difficult to include the information before they turn it on in this case though, although it could possibly be displayed on hover.
My point I guess is, I’m all for alerting the user of the potentially significant consequences, and I’m all for sites with email cost concerns having limitation controls, but there are some sites and some users for which the value of the emails far outweighs those costs.
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### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [March 25, 2016, 5:15am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/daily-limits-for-outgoing-mails-per-user/41458/25 "2016-03-25T05:15:19Z")
> [@sam](#):
>
> Watching a category is actually way worse than mailing list mode, if you want to stop the mail in mailing list mode you untick a box. To stop the mail when watching a category you have to hunt down all the watched topics and change them to default one by one, a process that can involve hundreds of clicks.
We already have a topic about fixing this, when you change at the category level prompt and ask if they want to reset all topics to the new state. We should add that to 1.6 because I do not think it would be hard.
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### Author:  [@DeanMarkTaylor](https://meta.discourse.org/u/DeanMarkTaylor)
#### Post date: [March 25, 2016, 5:44am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/daily-limits-for-outgoing-mails-per-user/41458/26 "2016-03-25T05:44:40Z")
> [@peternlewis](#):
>
> should either warn you (say if its up to ten per day) or alert you and make you confirm that is what you want to do if it is 10+/day.
This is like what Google Groups does when you select “Email Delivery Preference”:
It informs you of the approx. amount of emails.
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### Author:  [@eviltrout](https://meta.discourse.org/u/eviltrout)
#### Post date: [March 25, 2016, 2:51pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/daily-limits-for-outgoing-mails-per-user/41458/27 "2016-03-25T14:51:09Z")
I really love that estimate of emails per day! If we can add that it would be great.
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### Author:  [@erlend\_sh](https://meta.discourse.org/u/erlend_sh)
#### Post date: [March 28, 2016, 3:14pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/daily-limits-for-outgoing-mails-per-user/41458/28 "2016-03-28T15:14:05Z")
That’s part of the mailing list spec that @gdpelican is working on 😉 (can’t be bothered to dig up a link, posting on low-bandwidth tablet)
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### Author:  [@downey](https://meta.discourse.org/u/downey)
#### Post date: [March 28, 2016, 4:53pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/daily-limits-for-outgoing-mails-per-user/41458/29 "2016-03-28T16:53:40Z")
> [@sam](#):
>
> do you ever reach that scale
Is there an easy query or place to look to find out the answer to this question?
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### Author:  [@pfaffman](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pfaffman)
#### Post date: [March 28, 2016, 9:37pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/daily-limits-for-outgoing-mails-per-user/41458/30 "2016-03-28T21:37:03Z")
> [@downey](#):
>
> Is there an easy query or place to look to find out the answer to this question?
On the dashboard there is an “emails sent” line. Clicking that takes you to
[https://YOURSITE.com/admin/reports/emails](https://YOURSITE.com/admin/reports/emails)
---
### Author:  [@downey](https://meta.discourse.org/u/downey)
#### Post date: [March 28, 2016, 9:52pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/daily-limits-for-outgoing-mails-per-user/41458/31 "2016-03-28T21:52:06Z")
That’s total emails, though, not emails per day by person, unless I’m missing something.
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### Author:  [@Falco](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Falco)
#### Post date: [March 28, 2016, 10:20pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/daily-limits-for-outgoing-mails-per-user/41458/32 "2016-03-28T22:20:36Z")
To get per person you’ll need to use [Data Explorer](https://meta.discourse.org/t/32566?silent=true) plugin.
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### Author:  [@cpradio](https://meta.discourse.org/u/cpradio)
#### Post date: [March 28, 2016, 10:29pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/daily-limits-for-outgoing-mails-per-user/41458/33 "2016-03-28T22:29:55Z")
Try this using the [Data Explorer](https://meta.discourse.org/t/32566?silent=true) plugin
```plaintext
SELECT user_id, date_trunc('day', created_at) AS date_sent, COUNT(*) AS total
FROM email_logs
WHERE skipped = false
GROUP BY user_id, date_sent
ORDER BY total DESC
```
[emails-by-person.dcquery.json.txt](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/3X/c/2/c2502e6a225fa3608e6c4ed3a93ca3687bdc6d6f.txt) (286 Bytes)
**Edit:** Updated it to use date\_trunc
**Edit 2:** Added skipped check
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### Author:  [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### Post date: [March 28, 2016, 11:07pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/daily-limits-for-outgoing-mails-per-user/41458/34 "2016-03-28T23:07:50Z")
Also check for not skipped
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### Author:  [@downey](https://meta.discourse.org/u/downey)
#### Post date: [March 29, 2016, 12:41am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/daily-limits-for-outgoing-mails-per-user/41458/35 "2016-03-29T00:41:20Z")
Cool, that worked perfectly. Looks like we have less than 25 person-days (is that the right term?!) where this happened, so not too much panic.
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### Author:  [@gdpelican](https://meta.discourse.org/u/gdpelican)
#### Post date: [March 29, 2016, 1:20am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/daily-limits-for-outgoing-mails-per-user/41458/36 "2016-03-29T01:20:18Z")
Spec is here:
> [@More granular mailing list mode](https://meta.discourse.org/t/more-granular-mailing-list-mode/38107):
>
> I’m making this proposal in response to the following topics: I think the vast majority of the problems & shortcomings discussed in the topics above would be solved by slightly more granular options for the “mailing list mode”. Now that we have the option to [disable mailing list mode] altogether, I think it’s okay to give it a space of its own. I wanna go from this: (yes that’s a mockup but it accurately represents our current layout) (also note how “Send me an email for eve…
PR is here:
>
>
> As discussed here:
> https://meta.discourse.org/t/more-granular-mailing-list-mode/…38107
>
> As it looks now:
> !\[screen shot 2016-03-09 at 10 03 45 pm\](https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/750477/13630192/ef480fc6-e642-11e5-81e9-4bf30f5d6525.png)
>
> TODO:
> \- Determining when / how often to send grouped emails
> \- Designing email summary template
>
> Would particularly like some feedback on the formula for email guesstimation here:
> https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/4068/files#diff-08765a4c969575258af3892abcfa35a7R69
>
> Currently it's looking at the number of posts created over the past week / month (with the past week average weighted 3x the past month average). Could likely do better around removing private messages, whispers, other stuff not visible to the user, etc., but figured I'd start with what was laying around.
Related line of code:
```plaintext
def mailing_list_mode_frequency_estimate
# average of last 30 days of posts
@mailing_list_mode_frequency_estimate ||= About.fetch_stats[:posts_30_days].to_f / 30
end
```
As stated it’s really cheap to calc and a mild overestimate, but maybe that’s alright because it’s better to surprise folks with fewer emails rather than surprise them with more.
---
### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [April 9, 2016, 5:26am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/daily-limits-for-outgoing-mails-per-user/41458/37 "2016-04-09T05:26:47Z")
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