Email Notification Settings - Getting notified for things you care about

Hello Everyone,

As this Discourse site is across many communities, and different sections and tags have different levels of importance, I thought I would share some things I have found out about setting up email notifications for parts of the site you care the most about. This whole post is heavily based on this: How do I use Discourse via email? - FAQs - Mozilla Discourse post in the Mozilla discourse, but I am focusing on notifications not using the site via email.

Configuring Emails

To configure your global email settings go to the email section of your preferences, here you can configure when you get emails.

The main setting to change here is the “email me when I am quoted…” setting, if you set this to “only when away” or “always” then you will receive individual emails for various events, the key one for the rest of this post is in my watched categories, tags or topics. We want to enable this so that in the categories we subscribe to we get an email for each post.

(If you want to use Discourse like a mailing list set this to “always” as instructed in the Mozilla post.)

Watching Topics and Tags

The next step is to set the topics and tags you want to get emails for. For instance if you wanted to get notifications for all posts in the SunPy Announcements category, navigate to that category and click the bell icon:

I pick the “Watching First Post” option for announcement categories, which emails on a new post, and the “Watching” option for discussion categories where I want to get notified about all replies and posts.

You can do the same thing for tags, for instance to get notifications about all posts about Astropy coordination committee elections navigate to the coco-election tag and select the same bell icon:

Other Useful Options

Activity summary: you can get a daily or weekly summary for all topics (including ones you aren’t watching) in the email preferences.