Digest mode in Discourse - How to set User Email Preferences for Activity Summaries

[Bob_Jansen]

Is there a digest mode for notifications like tw used to have? I don’t want individual emails.

Bobj

[pmario]

If you open your “avatar” top right, you will get a “Preferences” button.
The emails menu shows the possibilities.

To test them, you can set the “Activity Summary” to 30 minutes. Then close all tabs and wait a bit. But don’t forget to switch it back

[boris]

@pmario not a big deal, but it’s best to point to existing posts rather than the same thing again. I previously posted this here:

How to turn off or modify email notifications?

@EricShulman asks: I greatly prefer to just check the online discussions, rather than getting lots of noise in my inbox. Discourse has a bunch of controls for managing your email notifications. [image] Under Preferences > Email in your account, you can set the “Send me an email when someone quotes me…” to “never”. Farther down the screenshot is the Activity Summary. This is sort of like a digest, but smart based on popular content and your tracking / mute settings that is personalized fo…

(conveniently, both that post and this one will now have “backlinks” between them to find related info)

@Bob_Jansen Discourse is mostly designed to help with information overload, including encouraging people to have longer titles that are good for search. There’s also a character minimum for replies, so that people can add a thumbs up instead of “sure” or “+1” and potentially sending an email for that

I hope you don’t mind, I’ve edited your title, to help others find this in the future.

[edheil]

I have it set to “daily” but I still get numerous emails per day. It doesn’t seem to actually work the way the google group did (daily summary email of everything that happened that day).

[pmario]

@Bob_Jansen … Important. The arrows in my image point to the elements that you can change. It doesn’t mean that you should set it that way!

This is just a screenshot from my current settings

[pmario]

Did you set the first to settings to “never”?

[edheil]

These are my settings – and I’m still getting individual emails.

[boris]

Hi @edheil yep, you likely still have Watching turned on for some categories.

Here is what I have under Settings > Categories:

You can remove the categories that are in Watched (get every post), Tracked (get first post and updates on follow ups), or Watch First Post (get the first post but no notification of follow updates unless you start tracking).

I covered a bit more about Notifications in this other thread:

Email Preferences - Configuration Ignored

The Notifications section of your preferences attempts to auto-subscribe you to topics you spend time reading. [Screen Shot 2021-08-25 at 9.51.47 AM] That’s the “Automatically track topics I enter” → After 4 minutes. So if you browse somewhere and keep it in a tab it will “track” it for you. You can set this to 10 minutes … or turn it off, to “never”. Then you’re in full manual mode, and can choose tracking on a per thread basis. The “bell” icon has your current settings for each thread. I…

So, if you read an individual post for 4 minutes it will get auto-tracked, which you turn off too if you like.

I think we set it up so the defaults are that new signups “Watch” the main Discussion category which would roughly be default mailing list behaviour.

Thanks for asking about it — let me know if that works for you.

[edheil]

That’s exactly it – thanks so much! I had the default setting of watching new discussions turned on.

So now with that turned off, I should still get daily summaries right?

I’m so used to being able to skim the digest for interesting stuff once a day.