While unlisted topics don’t get sent out on digest (correct behavior for sure IMO)…
Users with the “Send me an email for every new post (unless I mute the topic or category)” preferences checked get every update to an unlisted topic, even if they have not participated in the topic.
Repo:
User B has “Send me an email for every new post (unless I mute the topic or category)” setting on
User A posts new topic, User B gets email about new topic
Admin unlists topic
Subsequent posts to topic get sent to User B, even though User B never participated in the topic
Unlisted topics don’t appear in digests though. So I would think similarly they shouldn’t be sent out for users with the every new topic setting checked.
For instance if posts are being discussed like this where they need to stay private (although not guaranteed private of course if someone happened to have the link):
Of course emails should still go out to anyone that happened to have gone in & marked the topic as Watching or Tracking, but to receive email updates to a topic they otherwise never interacted with seems like a loophole to me.
However Ruby and whatever else involved to fix this would be way over my head. I really would love to contribute if I could. However in the meantime I think my efforts towards the Discourse project are best served finding nuanced bugs
Regardless, I would argue that admins expect those topics to be completely hidden to users that aren’t otherwise already involved in the topic. As I said, this seems like a loophole as virtue of the email me every new post feature, not an intended behavior admins would expect.
Just as posts to hidden topics don’t appear in a user’s /activity/posts - technically that’s not a list of topics either, but those posts aren’t listed there.
I really would love to!