The forum is experiencing a sudden increase in email traffic, with a significant spike in outgoing emails. Alexander_Wright has noticed this increase and provided screenshots to illustrate the issue.
pacman suggests using the ‘Email Statistics’ query in the Data Explorer plugin to identify the cause of the increase. However, this query only provides data from the current date, so modifications may be needed to analyze historical data.
JammyDodger notes that email logs are only kept for 90 days by default, limiting the scope of the investigation. They recommend checking the /admin/email/sent page to identify the types of emails causing the issue, such as those triggered by default watching categories or changes in activity summary frequency. Using filters on this page can help narrow down the list of emails.
I think you need to know what’s causing the extra emails first. You could use the ‘Email Statistics’ query in the Data Explorer plugin to get a good idea of what’s causing the increase in numbers.
The query only gives you a previous period from the current date. You could either modify it to accept a date range or run it a few times for increasing periods and put the data into a spreadsheet to calculate the monthly stats.
I think, by default, email logs are only kept for 90 days so this will restrict how far back in the history you can reach.
Having a glance down your /admin/email/sent page may shed some more light on exactly what kind of emails may be generating the excess. I think if you’ve set any categories to be default watching that can sneak up on you, or possibly a change in activity summary frequency? You can also use the filters at the top to narrow the list down, particularly the ‘email type’:
