Route @group mentions to a single email instead of notifying every member individually?

Support
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1

Hi all,

Looking for advice on a notification setup problem.

We have a group (~6 members, mostly non-technical clinical staff) that gets @ mentioned regularly on our forum. Every time it’s tagged, each member gets their own individual email, which has become a real source of frustration for them.

What I’m trying to achieve: When someone tags the group, or quotes someone who tagged the group, I’d like exactly one email to land in a shared mailbox (e.g. support@ourorg.org), rather than an email going out to every individual group member.

Ideally, the individual group members would also be able to fine-tune this themselves - i.e. stop getting emails for this specific group tag, without it touching their personal mention notifications. Several of them are active posters and still want to know when they’re personally mentioned or replied to; they just don’t want the group-tag noise.

What I’ve tried so far:

  • Created a dedicated “collector” account, set its email address to the shared mailbox, added it to the group, and set its personal notification preference (“Email me when quoted, replied to, @ mentioned…”) to “always.” This works and does deliver one email to the shared inbox per mention.
  • I was hoping there’d be a per-group notification level (Watching/Tracking/Muted) that members could set specifically for this one group, separate from their global “email me when mentioned” preference - similar to how category/tag notification levels work. I haven’t been able to find this anywhere in the group’s Members page, Manage tab, or in my own account preferences.

So my questions are, I think:

  1. Does a per-group mute/notification-level setting like this exist for group mentions specifically (as opposed to messages sent to a group inbox)? If so, where do members access it?
  2. If it doesn’t exist, is there a recommended way to achieve “one email per group tag” without asking every member to blanket-disable all their personal mention notifications?
  3. Would the Discourse Automation plugin (or another approach) be a better fit for this than what I’ve built?

Any pointers appreciated!

Thanks!

2

I think what you’d need to do (without changes to core) is create a new group, clinical-members that is the actual group, then move all the members to that group and out of the existing one (and if those users get permissions from that group, you’ll need to adjust category permissions accordingly). Next, create a clinical-announcements user with the group email address as its address, and add it to the clinical group. Then when people mention @clinical it’ll go to the single "user?

Wait. You don’t need a new group. After renaming the group, make a new user with the original name of the group with the shared mailbox as its email address.