Option to always receive digests even when you've been on the forum

What happened to this option? I was just asked about precisely this issue by someone in my community and now see that the settings available changed at some point.

We are in the process of trying to identify the “ideal settings” for email notifications for our community which we migrated to discourse from google groups. We are trying to encourage people to participate online but because we are a global network with people in “internet-remote” places, email remains key, and digests seem to be the only way to ensure people are informed of all the latest activity.

Here’s the request I got which is pretty concise. Any advice much appreciated.

@tobiaseigen what if I want to get emails of every new post, but only in certain categories? I can’t seem to find how to do that. The only way I see is to receive email for every new post, and mute the categories I don’t want every email for. But then, those muted categories don’t show up in the new or unread columns when I log into the website.

I’d ideally like my workflow to be as follows:

  1. get emails for everything that goes out to all staff and to leadership categories.
  2. for all other categories, I want to go to the website and check my “unread” and “new” tabs.

Finally, I tried to sign up for email digests but have been disappointed that I’m not getting any, presumably because I visit the forum. I still want the digests for my records, so I at least know there is one place where I can look back for stuff I know I’ve seen. Just because I drop by the site does not mean I’m reading everything thoroughly, and getting a digest gives me a second chance to catch up. (For this reason, I prefer not to suppress emails while on the site – although I know marena loves and uses that feature!) I vote for receiving digests regardless of appearances on the forum. But I also acknowledge that it may be a quirky personal preference, so we should go with what works for most people.