Ideally, my users would want different email preferences for Watched vs Tracked categories. For instance, some of us are using Discourse as a mailing list, some are not. Some users only care about a few categories, some all categories. So being able to “Watch” a category and receive emails for each new topic or reply is important for some users, but other users won’t want any emails at all (but they still want the notification settings on the website to stay the same).
Having different email settings for both “watched” and “tracked” categories would help, I think.
There are no plans for this on the current roadmap. This is also one of those “the existence of this unusual request, makes me wonder if there may be a better way to achieve what you wish to achieve” type situations…
I actually think the setting you are proposing would be actively harmful, because it adds a layer of complexity and confusion that did not exist before.
I’ve heard this request before. Right now there is no way to get the “blue notification bubble” for new posts on a topic without being emailed. Users can sort-of work around this if they use an email provider that supports filtering, and just auto-delete the emails, but that seems harsh. I can see the use case for notifications on the site without being emailed.
Yes, this is exactly the way I want to use the site, since I’m the moderator and I’m pretty much on the site all day long. But I don’t want to get emails about activity, I trust the notifications to show me when I need to look at something.
That being said, yes I can easily filter these emails away, so it’s not a huge deal for me.