Subscribe only the categories you want to receive emails about
Firstly, subscribe to the categories you want to receive emails about:
Thanks to this you can only receive emails about the category you want to listen to – e.g. “only Akka” or “only Play” etc.
Or even “only Akka HTTP” which was not possible on the old akka-user mailing list for example. So now you are able to have more fine grained control over which categories you are interested in.
Configure email notifications to mimic a mailing-list
In order to have the notifications be sent for new threads and replies, configure your email settings (click here) like this:
However you may of course tune it to your liking as you see fit!
Disabling the Activity Summary
The activity summary will email you if you don’t visit the forums with some “top interesting” topics.
If you want to consume the forum as-if-a mailing list you may want to keep this setting disabled.
If you’re curious about other threads you may enjoy this setting though.
Email notification example
To further show that it is pretty nice to use the group in this email driven mode, here is a notification example:
So as you can see, it looks pretty much like a mailing list. You can also directly reply to such a thread.
Replying to a thread via email
Replying to a thread via emails “just works” ™
It then shows up in forums with a small email icon, like this:
Warning about the “mailing list mode”
While Discourse offers a so-called “mailing list mode” that you can enable in your email settings in your preferences this mode is “all in”, and will deliver you emails for all categories in this forum. If your tagging and filtering skills are good, you may indeed want to try the mailing list mode and set up filters in your email client fine tuned such as you would normally. If you find a setup that works well for you, please do share it so others may also benefit from your findings.
Since this forum is shared between various tech, you most likely will find this style of interaction too noisy. We instead recommend tuning the notification settings, with combination of watching categories for an optimal user experience.