Earlier I had enabled Tracking for a particular category. I wasn’t receiving new topic or post emails. As soon as I enabled Send me an email for every new post I started receiving email notification of for all topics and posts.
How are these two related?
Is the only difference between tracking and normal is that tracking adds a count of new replies is shown?
I don’t want email notification for every message but an email notification for each new topic which it seems is not possible with Discourse. And then I can decide which topic I want to participate in. Email notification for new topics in a category is a pretty common feature for forums.
It is not a topic I have replied to. My reply indicate I want to participate in a topic. Just a new reply doesn’t indicate I am interest in that topic.
My immediate question is Send me an email for every new post (unless I mute the topic or category) what does this setting do? How is it different from watch? Which categories is it applied to?
Not to be rude, but it does exactly what it says it does. Unless you are on the site (see the user preference directly below this one), you will receive an email for each and every new post or topic unless the topic itself, or the category the topic is created in is muted.
It is applied to everything on the site, until you explicitly mute something. Watch is applied on a topic or category level, and is more controllable.
All categories, unless you mute the category.
From your first post:
Tracking will not send emails, as it does not create notifications. Assuming default user preferences, you will only receive emails if you receive a notification regarding the topic, which is only generated if you are @mentioned, quoted, replied to, or watching the topic.
If I have Send me an email for every new post enabled and I change notification settings in a category topic to normal which will get precedence the former or the later. If former gets the precedence then watch, track, and normal should be grayed out because only mute can override Send me an email for every new post.
If you have that enabled, you have gone nuclear, this means every single post that occurs on the site, now and forevermore, will be emailed to you. It is really not recommended.
Thanks. I wanted to make sure that there is some logic to my arguments.
I can see why that is not recommended.
In my use case, it is a small community of people working on a set of programming problems. That’s why I wanted to participate in full extent. I want to see how other folks are doing, read their code and help them once I have completed my own work. So there isn’t a lot of chatter.
I am used to old school forums where you can get RSS feed for all new topics which then you can visit and subscribe to if you want to participate further. I am also used to GNU Mailman mailing lists where you basically get everything. I am neither able to get notified of new topics nor use Discourse as mailing list. There’s no way to get notified of new topics in particular categories. I read Discourse can be used as a mailing list replacement but both my desktop client KDE KMail or web client Zoho Mail are not able to thread emails like from GNU Mailman mailing lists. I am not sure if it a problem on my side or Discourse doesn’t support email threading.
All that being said the more I use Discourse I think the best way for me would be is to visit it several times a day and find all new posts in top bar New tab. And then from there I can watch individual topics. I have also set Consider topics new when - I haven't viewed them yet and Never - automatically track topics I enter. All categories in my Discourse instance are set to Normal. So I will notified from topics I am not watching. That gives me good amount of control.
You will get everything if you turn on mailing list mode, which is the option you described. So you should be set. If you want the site to work like a 1996 era mailing list, you have found the option to do that – you will be emailed every single time anyone posts anything on the site INCLUDING A NEW TOPIC with that enabled. That’s why I called it “nuclear mode”.
Remember, a brand new topic is simply a “first reply”. So it’s the same as any other reply from the perspective of that code, from reply 1, to reply 100.
As for email threading, Discourse provides all the necessary email headers to attach all replies to the topic, e.g. each topic has a unique string – the URL – that’s included in the email headers for every reply to that topic and the first post in that topic. You can view source on the email to browse the headers and see them yourself.
I’m not aware of such a setting. You can just have them watch all categories. If you search here you can find links to plugins that could enforce that with a bit of programing.