Just how much email does Discourse send?

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I want to use discourse, but the whole “email is critical thing” made it seem like Discourse sends email heavily and I don’t want an expensive mailgun bill. Just how much email does discourse send by default? On what events?

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Don’t know the size of your community, but the Mailgun free plan should get you pretty far. Then there is SparkPost that offers 100K emails on the free plan. My forum has never exceeded the Mailgun 10K free quota.

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How many active members by month?

I send 10k mails by day, but that’s heavily dependent on the size and activity patterns of your community.

And Discourse let’s you configure everything so you can pretty much cap the mailing:

  • Disable the mailing list option
  • Increase the delay for emails, so the user has the chance to see the notification on the site and the email is automatically canceled
  • use the new push notifications plugins and make the delay bigger (I use something like 4 hours)
  • make the inactive window to get digests smaller, I made mine the half of the default

You can go nuclear and disable email if everything is going nuts, but relax if you’re sending that much email you probably getting some money somehow.

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At our site:

Registered users: 354
User visits/month: 1044
Posts/month: 2077
Emails/month: 12610

We make fairly heavy use of @mentions

So based on that, you’d be able to have a user base of ~2,800 making ~14,300 posts per month on the 100k free plan. YMMV.

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In general:

  • Inactive users (users who have not visited the site in 7 days, but have an account) get 1 digest/summary email per week. After 1 year of absence, no more digest/summary emails will be sent to that user. That is a maximum of 52 emails over a one year period for each fully inactive user.

  • Users will be emailed* for each direct-reply notification they receive while they are “away”. By direct reply, we mean when someone is talking directly to that person, either by:

    • replying to a topic that person created

    • mentioning this user by @name

    • quoting this user, anywhere

    • pressing the reply button on one of this user’s posts

    • sending a personal message to this user (requires trust level 1)

* Note that users will not get emailed by default while they are actively browsing the site in their web browser, to avoid double notification.

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BTW, and sorry for going slightly off the topic, but have you guys made any analysis on how engaging the digest newsletter is?

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It is more engaging than zero email to them. But seriously it is derived from /top so how you feel about /top should tell you how you would feel about weekly summary emails!

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Also, engagement will be strongly influenced by how good the content on your forum actually is. The best-looking digest isn’t going to get anyone’s attention if they don’t see any topics worth reading.

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Of course. I was not discrediting the Digest - I was just wondering whether it has been studied. Also considering whether I should send it out bi-weekly, as more frequent may be considered spammy.

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For me, internal discourse digest is the main thing bringing people to the site. The fact it uses most liked posts makes it very appealing to my users.

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Any way I can minify the amount of email discourse sends? (disabling digest, turning off reply notifications by default and still allowing them to opt in, increasing timeout on active browsing)

Any docs on that?

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There is a tab in the settings just for that: Email.

The settings you are looking for are:

  • email time window mins
  • private email time window seconds
  • delete digest email after days
  • disable digest emails
  • max emails per day per user
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Awesome. Thank you very much.

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