# Mailing list question
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/mailing-list-question/69657
**Category:** Feature
**Created:** [September 8, 2017, 6:33pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/mailing-list-question/69657 "2017-09-08T18:33:02Z")
**Posts on this page:** 10
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@outofthebox](https://meta.discourse.org/u/outofthebox)
#### Post date: [September 8, 2017, 6:33pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/mailing-list-question/69657/1 "2017-09-08T18:33:02Z")
Hi,
Let’s say I have a unique group of people who really only want to interact in one category within our community. They also want to use a mailing list like feature to get all the emails from that category and participate by email. Instead of giving them a mailing list, we want to include them as users on our community platform so their involvement is secure and connected to our organization - perhaps from time to time they’ll look over the fence and see what else is going on. But we want to respect the fact that they only want the mailing list functionality for ‘their’ category.
If they have the mailing list feature turned on, they are in a group together, that group has access to a private category, they have notifications muted for all other categories, and they are watching their private category, will this setup work as desired?
---
### Author:  [@tobiaseigen](https://meta.discourse.org/u/tobiaseigen)
#### Post date: [September 8, 2017, 8:46pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/mailing-list-question/69657/2 "2017-09-08T20:46:40Z")
We handle this in our community by using the category watching settings, which we can set for other members using the following howto. Basically you’d set the mailing list category to WATCHING and the rest to NORMAL. We stay away from mailing list mode altogether.
> [@Edit a user preference for everyone or a subset of users](https://meta.discourse.org/t/edit-a-user-setting-for-all-discourse-users/25162):
>
> bookmark This guide explains how to edit a user preference for everyone or a subset of users in Discourse. person_raising_hand Required user level: System Administrator warning Console access is required. If you need to update the user preference for all of your users or a large subset of users, you can do so via the rails console. Summary In this guide, you’ll learn: How to access the Rails console for making bulk changes Examples of modifying user preferences How to identify se…
---
### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [September 9, 2017, 12:17am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/mailing-list-question/69657/3 "2017-09-09T00:17:42Z")
Mailing list mode won’t send any emails about topics or categories you have muted, so they’d need to mute every other category except the one they care about.
However, this would also mute those categories in the web UI.
---
### Author:  [@rriemann](https://meta.discourse.org/u/rriemann)
#### Post date: [September 9, 2017, 11:30am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/mailing-list-question/69657/4 "2017-09-09T11:30:49Z")
I find this question relevant as well for multi-lingual communities. Here, users should use a configuration that allows them to receive only notifications from their language-category they have chosen.
If all other categories would be set to normal, they would still receive in their digest messages they cannot understand from other language categories.
---
### Author:  [@outofthebox](https://meta.discourse.org/u/outofthebox)
#### Post date: [September 12, 2017, 7:44pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/mailing-list-question/69657/5 "2017-09-12T19:44:03Z")
Hi @tobiaseigen,
Thanks for this. I got a bit lost in the technical discussion. Am I understanding you correctly to say that… You modified the standard Discourse settings so that if a user has selected ‘watching’ for a given category, then they receive email updates for every post in that category?
I’m curious why you “stay away from mailing list mode altogether” - any key reasons for this?
@rriemann, great point. It makes sense that people who are focused on a specific language category can receive updates only in their language.
---
### Author:  [@outofthebox](https://meta.discourse.org/u/outofthebox)
#### Post date: [September 12, 2017, 7:44pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/mailing-list-question/69657/6 "2017-09-12T19:44:51Z")
A follow-up question: what happens when a mailing list gets very active? Let’s say there’s 50-60 emails/day in a given category. Is there an option for a Daily or Weekly Digest for the category?
---
### Author:  [@LeoMcA](https://meta.discourse.org/u/LeoMcA)
#### Post date: [September 13, 2017, 10:58am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/mailing-list-question/69657/7 "2017-09-13T10:58:37Z")
> [@CarsonWeitnauer](#):
>
> You modified the standard Discourse settings so that if a user has selected ‘watching’ for a given category, then they receive email updates for every post in that category?
If a user has selected ‘watching’ for a category they’ll receive email notifications for every post in that category, unless they’re active on the site. If they set “Send me email notifications even when I am active on the site” in their email preferences, then they’ll receive email notifications even when they are active.
If I understand @tobiaseigen correctly he’s saying that he sets a certain category to ‘watching’ for all users, so they all receive notifications for that category.
> [@CarsonWeitnauer](#):
>
> I’m curious why you “stay away from mailing list mode altogether” - any key reasons for this?
Mailing list mode sends users an email for every post they have permissions to see on the site. So for active instances this can be a huge number of emails, and for diverse instances it can include a lot of irrelevant notifications.
> [@CarsonWeitnauer](#):
>
> Let’s say there’s 50-60 emails/day in a given category. Is there an option for a Daily or Weekly Digest for the category?
Not that I know of.
---
### Author:  [@outofthebox](https://meta.discourse.org/u/outofthebox)
#### Post date: [September 13, 2017, 12:08pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/mailing-list-question/69657/8 "2017-09-13T12:08:36Z")
Thank you for helping me have a higher confidence in my understanding of these settings.
FWIW, I would request having a Digest option for category notifications. I believe that is a time-tested functionality that would help people stay engaged with Discourse on a busy, active site.
---
### Author:  [@tobiaseigen](https://meta.discourse.org/u/tobiaseigen)
#### Post date: [September 13, 2017, 2:37pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/mailing-list-question/69657/9 "2017-09-13T14:37:56Z")
Thanks @LeoMcA! You’ve got it all pretty much right on the nail.
About staying away from mailing list mode.. what I’ve learned is simply that discourse is a very different beast from mailing lists. So while the feature is there for those who really don’t ever intend to log in and are stubbornly hanging on to the mailing list way of doing things, it’s a pretty huge compromise in terms of experience and information overload for those people. This is especially true for communities where very different types of conversations are happening in different categories.
If you want to make those people happy, you have to jump through all sorts of hoops and I’ve found it to just not be worth the effort. Better to have them turn off mailing list mode and use the category watching feature for the categories they care most about - or to set it for them.
---
### Author:  [@wesochuck](https://meta.discourse.org/u/wesochuck)
#### Post date: [September 13, 2017, 3:40pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/mailing-list-question/69657/10 "2017-09-13T15:40:24Z")
> [@CarsonWeitnauer](#):
>
> I would request having a Digest option for category notifications
I think that the team is staying away from explicitly cloning the email digest feature. You can find more discussions on the topic in this thread:
> [@Please restore email digests](https://meta.discourse.org/t/please-restore-email-digests/63895):
>
> I am in the process of migrating my club from a Yahoo! mailing list to Discourse. During my investigation, Discourse seemed to be the ideal solution. Many of our users insist on retaining mailing list functionality, but many also want the forum environment. Discourse seemed like the perfect fix. About 1/3 of our users opt for a daily or weekly digest on the current mailing list. They have made it clear that the digest function is a must-have. When I began looking at Discourse I’m pretty sure it…
I think in the end someone developed a plugin to mimic some of this functionality:
> [@Restore Mailing List Mode Daily Summary](https://meta.discourse.org/t/restore-mailing-list-mode-daily-summary/64761?source_topic_id=63895):
>
> For a variety of reasons the option for mailing list mode users to receive a daily summary email was removed. It turns out there are a handful of communities that relied on this feature and as such it provoked a [good discussion about the restoration of the feature](https://meta.discourse.org/t/please-restore-email-digests/63895). It was mentioned in that topic that I was working on this. Thanks to @lkramer and team for sponsoring this work! tada[https://github.com/joebuhlig/discourse-mlm-daily-summary](https://github.com/joebuhlig/discourse-mlm-daily-summary) This plugin adds an option to the email preferences for…