Turning on "Summary email" digests on a big community with a big past

[pgr]

Hi. My question regards a quite large Community (> 50k users), with tons of posts imported from the previous incarnation of the forums. It’s possible that a high percentage of those people haven’t visited for months or even years.

The Summary Emails (digests) have been disabled ever since we migrated to Discourse some years ago, but I’d like to have them turned on, they’re nice and useful.

My concern is what will happen if I turn on the feature? Will it cause tens of thousands of emails to be triggered?

Is there any way to tweak the logic? For example, telling Discourse to not bother emailing people who haven’t visited in a loooong time? Or dividing it up in batches so we can see how people react?

The answers I’m looking for might be technical, but not necessarily - if there’s any generic strategic community-handling advice, I’d like to hear that, too. Thanks!

[Moin]

@pgr

For example, telling Discourse to not bother emailing people who haven’t visited in a loooong time?

I think there is a setting

@erlend_sh

suppress digest email after days: suppress summary emails for users not seen on the site for more than (n) days (defaults to 180)

[pgr]

Cool. What about batching, are there settings for that somewhere?

I was also about to ask for ways to send just to a small group of users for testing, but I guess the “Admin Testing” screen should allow us the necessary previews.

[Stephen]

Why not reduce the threshold from 180 days to a small number, so only your highly engaged users pilot it?