Running into a weird issue here with Flarum (on freeflarum.com): I've had several people follow a certain discussion, and they are only notified of new posts via email once they have replied to the discussion. So posts before their own reply don't trigger the email, while posts after their own reply do.
They have the "Someone posts in a discussion I'm following" via email set to on, and "Automatically follow discussions that I reply to" set to off.