I’m not sure that this is the case. I could be going crazy. Did the timer for user recently seen in email sending get shorter since commit a2c85f0845? I restarted 2 days ago to troubleshoot an issue and seems like I’m getting emails more often than I was before.
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User seen logic did change per @sam but it should be better (more sophisticated, more accurate), not worse. Can you elaborate?
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It’s not that it’s worse per se, and I haven’t timed it to be exactly sure, but seems like if I haven’t been active in 45 minutes, I receive emails for topics I either created or participated in.
For example. I created a post at 10:02am today and the first response was at 12:45pm today. Between the topic creation and the first reply I was either reading other topics or in the admin panel of discourse and navigating pages at least every 15-20 minutes or so. But I still received an email about the reply at 12:45pm.
This could be the more accurate part and helps me understand when emails are getting sent and when they aren’t. The average age of my members is probably 46 so sometimes I have to explain why the forum did something 
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The TLDR here is that previously we would “think” you were online when in fact you were not. This was fixed.
From early days of Discourse only when away option was coupled to the email_time_window_mins site setting (which is set to 10 minutes by default)
One minor side effect is that this number is used both to queue emails and to check for when user was around last.
So, for example, if you want users to be emailed real quick, but only if you did not see them on the site for 30 minutes, you can not do that.
In the past we would email users 10 minutes after a post was made, if they were not seen in the last 10 minutes. (if only when away user pref is set)
This has not changed, but we fixed the bug where we “thought” you were around and in fact was not.
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So to summarize it in case I start getting questions from my membership, emails are generated on topics you created/participated in and DMs when you are not active on the site for 10mins, and as of some recent changes you’ve gone from thinking a user is inactive to knowing a user is inactive?
If that’s the case, is there or will there be a setting to customize the inactivity timer?
Correct. In the past we would count a user as ‘active’ if they left the browser open and walked away. Now we check for actual activity (scrolling, clicking) to decide whether someone is active.
As Sam mentioned, it’s tied to the email time window mins site setting, so you can customize that.
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Ooop… My bad. Read right past that! Thanks for the details everyone!
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This is important to note.
email time window mins site
Means TWO things. So for example say you set email time window mins site` to 60:
-
All emails from Discourse to notify of new replies and so on will be delayed by 60 minutes.
-
Users with
only when awayset in profile will not be emailed if they were seen in the last 60 minutes.
The delay is currently coupled, we should probably add a new site setting here.
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