The discussion revolves around disabling outgoing email notifications in a Discourse site, specifically for a focus group and a gated site with sensitive content.
John_Fleming wants to prevent emails containing post content from being sent to users, while still allowing signup and signin-related emails. codinghorror suggests changing the user preference default for email to all off, but notes that users can still re-enable notifications.
John_Fleming explains that the goal is to minimize content leakage from the site by not sending automatic emails. codinghorror points out that a private mode in site settings can be enabled to prevent content from being leaked in emails.
Nesha and rachel-statsnz from the same organization share similar concerns about content leaks on their gated site and want to prevent email notifications from containing sensitive content. They are considering composing their own digests instead of using the default digest emails.
sam suggests enabling the private email setting, which is a global setting that users cannot override.
I’m having some trouble understanding the outgoing email options. Basically, I don’t want any outgoing emails to be sent that contain post content (i.e. if someone has replied to a topic) and probably I’d rather nobody get email when they receive a PM either (although that would be acceptable).
I found the setting to disable ALL outgoing email and it seems to work quite well, but I need emails related to signing up and signing in to work (reset password link, etc.)
Can I turn off all email notifications, and keep signup/signin emails functional?
Sort of, you can change the user preference default for email to all off. Then all new (but not existing…) users will have email notifications disabled. However this does not stop users from turning those settings back on.
Got it, as the administrator, is there any way to make that the default? Or do I need to impersonate each user and disable those email settings (with the knowledge they can always reenable them…)?
We are only going to have a minimal # of users at a time so that’s not a terrible burden, the worse problem is that they can re-enable those settings. I think we can live with it though.
Sorry, can you expand on why you want this stuff permanently disabled? As an admin you can set the defaults, but as it stands there is no global disable switch.
Yes, we are using a Discourse site for sort of an online “focus group.” To the extent possible, we don’t want content from the site to be emailed out to users, with the privacy of the users in mind (the content is itself not “secret” or anything).
Obviously, any user can copy and paste stuff out of the site or screen capture it, etc. I’m not under the illusion that content can’t escape any way other than email. We just aren’t going to have any need for the email notifications, and would rather keep site content from being automatically sent to user’s emails.
Our intention is to archive the content after each site and store one local copy, encrypted. It would be nice if there weren’t other copies sitting in user’s email boxes indefinitely.
