We use Discourse to send messages to groups.
Unfortunately, when sending a group message, many members do not receive an email notification containing the group message.
Would it be possible to forcibly send an email notification to members of a group when a message is sent to them? Especially when the message comes from a staff member.
Why not?
Have you looked at the “Send me an email when someone messages” me setting in the user profiles? By default, Discourse doesn’t send emails for notifications that the user has seen on the site.
Good point but this is a relatively new setting so people would not be expected to widely know about it, yet.
We use one Discourse instance to communicatie to groups of students.
We want to use Discourse to easily get a message in their email-inbox by addressing it to the group name.
For this reason we’re looking to force-send a notification for a private message addressed to a group.
But if it’s not possible, we’ll just do it the old-fashioned email-to-email way 
The setting that I mentioned controls when emails are sent. I suspect that there is a site setting that controls the default and you’ll need to change the user profile setting for accounts that already exist.
By default they don’t get an email if they have already seen the notification, because it’s annoying to be notified twice. If they haven’t been on the site they do get an email. The last undergrads I taught didn’t read email anyway.
What did they do when they forgot their passwords, then? Create new accounts?
They probably used email for that, but I got the distinct impression that they didn’t check email like you or I. So sending notifications there was of limited use.
And it seemed that they were even less likely to check the university mailbox.
hi all together,
i would like to re-open this question as we run into similar questions as @pipkin and it seems we don’t really understand the behaviour of discourse here.
as far as i can see, a private message to a group is not send to all members of the group. following the logs discourse is just not sending the message via email to some users.
as far as i can see at least some of those users not getting an email have “Send me an email when someone messages” set to ALWAYS. i also know that some of them have definitly not seen the notification on the site.
is there anything else that could prevent discourse from sending out emails to all members of a group?
and: do you know the name of the database column which holds the user setting “Send me an email when someone messages”? i could find it so far …