(sorry about my funny typos above - will correct them. My phone does a terrible time autocompleting words sometimes…)
Sounds interesting. I think you are pushing the limits of what staged user functionality is intended for. But I guess we do allow this setting for categories, which creates staged users, so your assumption is that these staged user should be getting replies to their topics? I’m not sure that’s an assumption shared by the team, or by other sites using this setting. I think that’s a setting meant to allow a forum category to mirror a mailing list, even when subscribers of that mailing list are not all signed up on the forum.
I’d suggest you try a few other things.
(1) if you are admin, you can take a look at a staged user’s email and notification settings. Maybe some of the default user settings are not compatible with your way of working. For example, the “only email me when away” setting might need to be set to “always” on your site. Same thing with “when I post in a topic, set that topic to tracking” maybe needs to be set to “watching”. When you are tracking, you won’t get replies except to your own posts.
(2) you might consider using a group inbox instead for these support requests from anonymous emails. They likely will like be happy with having their requests showing up in google searches anyway. You could then use what you learn to start new topics in the forum, with personally identifiable details removed.
If the above doesn’t satisfy you, maybe there is a bug worth looking into dealing with the category settings and staged users. Someone else on my team will need to decide that…