# Just how much email does Discourse send?
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/just-how-much-email-does-discourse-send/47786
**Category:** Self-hosting
**Tags:** hosting
**Created:** [July 25, 2016, 8:52pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/just-how-much-email-does-discourse-send/47786 "2016-07-25T20:52:11Z")
**Posts on this page:** 13
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Jaxkr](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Jaxkr)
#### Post date: [July 25, 2016, 8:52pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/just-how-much-email-does-discourse-send/47786/1 "2016-07-25T20:52:11Z")
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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### Author:  [@ljpp](https://meta.discourse.org/u/ljpp)
#### Post date: [July 25, 2016, 9:18pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/just-how-much-email-does-discourse-send/47786/2 "2016-07-25T21:18:02Z")
Don’t know the size of your community, but the Mailgun free plan should get you pretty far. Then there is [SparkPost](https://www.sparkpost.com/) that offers 100K emails on the free plan. My [forum](http://tappara.co/about) has never exceeded the Mailgun 10K free quota.
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### Author:  [@Falco](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Falco)
#### Post date: [July 25, 2016, 9:26pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/just-how-much-email-does-discourse-send/47786/3 "2016-07-25T21:26:41Z")
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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### Author:  [@Tom\_Newsom](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Tom_Newsom)
#### Post date: [July 25, 2016, 9:40pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/just-how-much-email-does-discourse-send/47786/4 "2016-07-25T21:40:10Z")
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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### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [July 26, 2016, 12:57am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/just-how-much-email-does-discourse-send/47786/5 "2016-07-26T00:57:02Z")
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:
\* 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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### Author:  [@ljpp](https://meta.discourse.org/u/ljpp)
#### Post date: [July 26, 2016, 6:13am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/just-how-much-email-does-discourse-send/47786/6 "2016-07-26T06:13:26Z")
> [@codinghorror](#):
>
> 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.
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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### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [July 26, 2016, 6:19am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/just-how-much-email-does-discourse-send/47786/7 "2016-07-26T06:19:35Z")
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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### Author:  [@mpalmer](https://meta.discourse.org/u/mpalmer)
#### Post date: [July 26, 2016, 6:21am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/just-how-much-email-does-discourse-send/47786/8 "2016-07-26T06:21:35Z")
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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### Author:  [@ljpp](https://meta.discourse.org/u/ljpp)
#### Post date: [July 26, 2016, 6:24am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/just-how-much-email-does-discourse-send/47786/9 "2016-07-26T06:24:26Z")
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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### Author:  [@Falco](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Falco)
#### Post date: [July 26, 2016, 11:56am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/just-how-much-email-does-discourse-send/47786/10 "2016-07-26T11:56:34Z")
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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### Author:  [@Jaxkr](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Jaxkr)
#### Post date: [July 26, 2016, 4:30pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/just-how-much-email-does-discourse-send/47786/11 "2016-07-26T16:30:40Z")
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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### Author:  [@Falco](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Falco)
#### Post date: [July 26, 2016, 4:38pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/just-how-much-email-does-discourse-send/47786/12 "2016-07-26T16:38:07Z")
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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### Author:  [@Jaxkr](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Jaxkr)
#### Post date: [July 26, 2016, 5:31pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/just-how-much-email-does-discourse-send/47786/13 "2016-07-26T17:31:16Z")
Awesome. Thank you very much.