Is there actually anyone out there who wants to get emails from a forum forever just because they made a post once asking for help? I truly can’t fathom why on earth anyone would ever be stupid enough to make that be the default, unless it’s for marketing - in which case it’s quite literally spam.
An admin makes that decision, and it is a policy that should discuss on that level.
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It’s a tough choice. It’s surely there to drive engagement? The balance between “driving engagement” and spamming is a fine one?
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Do you mean here on Meta or other Discourse forums?
This link will take you to email frequency settings on your profile. You can also access this by clicking on your profile pic in the header and click on preferences.
Emails in your preferences can change email frequency to never in a variety of choices for when to send one an email.
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The digest will stop being sent at a configurable time if there are no visits.
If you ask for help, one could assume that you are willing to give help in exchange and be part of a collective of people supporting each other. This is the spirit of joining a community.
You can leave anytime by deleting your account.
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Yes, this is exactly the visceral reaction I had to the OP, but didn’t share … and you’ve phrased it perfectly.
There is a quid pro quo in engaging a community for help, and accepting some “spam/marketing/engagement driving” is part of that. You got your expert responses, they got an additional prospect.
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It would have been quicker to hit unsubscribe on one email than to come here and complain. 
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I changed the title so it is less clickbait. Defaults for all forums is certainly something we consider.
Ultimately, forum admins are in charge. If they decide to prioritize engagement via emails, it is their choice.
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It’s not forever. It’s for suppress digest email after days days (that defaults to 180).
Usually when you join a community you care about what’s happening there.
And your first message includes a link that you can say you never want another email.
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To be fair to the OP: not every community is meta (
).
If I need help to get some error message resolved on some software product I purchased, that doesn’t make me overflow with warmth for that product community necessarily. There’s lots of use cases of forums centered around technical support. I’ve made lots of “this doesn’t work” posts on the apple forum for example, definitely don’t want to say “updated” with news of the whole ecosystem.
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Then the people who run that community should change the default.
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I’m not saying that isn’t a solution, I’m trying to offer some perspective to those in the thread who seem intent on just smashing OPs post, based on emotional kneejerk reactions about giving back to the community.
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The question was “why is this the default” and the answer is that it’s been that for 10 years and he’s the first person to complain. It’s the most appropriate default for most communities. I’m have accounts on many many sites I don’t care about, it’s not hard to turn off the summary emails.
A reasonable feature request might be a checkbox on account creation to opt out.
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There’s an earlier request for a similar feature here: Please don't autosubscribe me to summary emails
It’s something we are open to giving people more control over when they create their account and we’ve discussed some possible designs, but we haven’t had a chance to go any further than that yet.
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I don’t think digest emails would technically count as transactional (especially if it’s not a digest of activity I’ve taken part in), so we should probably disable them by default on new sites. They should require explicit opt-in.
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