So I’ll start by mentioning that we ship the default email messages level to be set as “always.” This is kind of surprising to me, but maybe the idea is that direct messages typically need as much exposure as possible.
Anyway, I just created a test account here on Meta and sent that account a PM. I continued to browse the forum under the test user account, ignoring the new message notification.
I checked the logs a couple minutes later and it looks like it is skipping:
That’s despite:
So to answer your question, I can indeed repro on meta!