Today I got dozens of Discussions emails that came from threads created in April 2024, several of these did not even have a single reply. Meaning this wasn’t just an added comment. And it was always the OP post that appeared in the email as if it was a new thread.
How come I sometimes get emails from such old threads in my inbox?
Just a shot in the dark, but perhaps it’s a combination of the “Consider topics unread when they are closed” setting in your notification preferences and your email settings. Do you have it enabled and were those posts closed recently?
I was getting a bunch of (website) notifications today from someone editing the tags in a ton of threads that I had replied to. Maybe something akin to that?
Though I have email notifications turned off. I don’t need an email everytime someone replies to a thread I’ve been in.
Hmmm I turned it off just to be sure. Weird setting though. “Closed” here means the thread gets closed, right? Can’t imagine what the use case for having such threads become unread is.
These email spams are just annoying because it takes time to realize I’m reading something way old, plus I hit the 100 emails max limit today just because of these mass updates.
Yes, the official response in discourse meta is that:
This is by design – people who were tracking the topic may want to know that it was closed.
But it could also be a different reason, because of deleted spam posts, someone writes a post, the admin deletes it, but you still get a notification that there are unread posts, as described here: https://meta.discourse.org/t/number-of-unread-replies-is-different-than-number-of-topic-replies-due-to-reply-deletions/142244/3