📬 Digest Mail — bring your quiet members back, automatically
Every forum has them: members who signed up, got excited, and then quietly drifted away. They're not gone — they're just not thinking about your community today. Digest Mail is how you stay on their radar.
Instead of firing off a notification every time something happens, Digest Mail sends one beautifully formatted summary email on a schedule each member chooses — a tidy recap of everything they missed, with buttons that drop them right back into the conversation.
One great email beats a hundred notifications. Quiet members come back. Active members never miss a beat.
✨ What lands in every inbox
Each digest is a clean, branded recap of what happened since the last one:
- ⭐ Featured discussion — pin your most important thread to the top of every email with a highlighted card and a one-tap button. Announcements, rules, big events — front and centre.
- 🆕 New discussions — everything started during the period, with author and reply counts.
- 🔥 Active discussions — the hottest conversations, ranked by a smart activity score you can tune.
- 👀 Unread, just for them — each member sees the discussions they personally haven't read yet. No two emails are quite the same.
- 👋 New members — a warm welcome list with avatars, so newcomers get noticed.
- 📊 Community stats — a four-number pulse of the period: posts, discussions, new members, active users.
- ❤️ Favourite discussions — the most-loved threads, with a per-emoji reaction breakdown when reactions are enabled.
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🧩 It gets even richer with your other extensions
Got more installed? Digest Mail automatically folds them in:
- 🏆 Leaderboard — top point-earners with a podium for the top three, movers, and a "biggest mover" spotlight.
- 🎖️ Badges — who earned what, the most-awarded badge, and the rarest one of the period.
- 🏈 Pick'em — upcoming matches members can still vote on, recent results, and current standings.
- 🎮 Gamepedia — the most-discussed game pages and newly added titles.
- 🥇 Awards — live and upcoming awards with countdowns, categories, and current front-runners.
Each section only shows up when its extension is active — and you decide the order they appear from a simple drag-to-reorder admin tab.
🗓️ Members choose how often. You stay in control.
- Each member picks their own rhythm — daily, weekly, monthly, or off — right from their account settings.
- You set the send time in your own timezone, not the server's.
- Running a big forum? Switch on a send window (say, 2–5 a.m.) and Digest Mail trickles emails out batch by batch to keep server load low and steady — then stops on its own when everyone's been sent.
- Prefer to keep it simple? Offer just weekly and monthly and hide the daily option entirely.
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💌 Built to look great and respect your members
- 📱 Works everywhere — a rock-solid layout that renders cleanly in Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, and every major mobile client.
- 🎨 On-brand automatically — headings, buttons, and accents pull from your forum's own colours with zero setup.
- 🌓 Light & dark mode — with night mode installed, each member's email matches their theme preference.
- ✅ One-click unsubscribe — every email has a secure, long-lived unsubscribe link that always works, so members trust it and stay subscribed.
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🚀 Installation
Install it like any Flarum extension:
composer require ernestdefoe/digest-mail
php flarum migrate
php flarum cache:clear
Then enable it in Admin → Extensions and set your schedule under the extension's Settings tab.
One important step: digests are sent by Flarum's scheduler, so you'll need a single cron entry on your server (most hosts let you add this in seconds):
* * * * * cd /path/to/your/forum && php flarum schedule:run >> /dev/null 2>&1
That one line is what makes the magic happen on time — without it, the emails won't send.
Updating
composer update ernestdefoe/digest-mail
php flarum migrate
php flarum cache:clear
🙏 Credits & license
Digest Mail builds on the original Digest extension created by Resofire — huge thanks for the foundation this is built on. This release is rebuilt and maintained for Flarum 2 by ernestdefoe.
Released under the MIT License — free to use, free to build on.
🔗 Links
🔄 Migrating from resofire/digest-mail
Already running the original? This fork is drop-in compatible — it uses the same database schema (the digest_frequency and digest_last_sent_at columns on users, plus the digest_unsubscribe_tokens and digest_send_log tables) and the same /digest/unsubscribe route. The migrations are idempotent — they detect and skip anything that already exists — so switching keeps all of your subscriber data.
Carries over automatically: every member's subscription status and frequency, their last-sent timestamps, and existing unsubscribe tokens — so unsubscribe links in already-delivered emails keep working.
Does not carry over: admin-side settings (content limits, schedule, integration toggles, section order). This fork uses its own setting prefix, so those reset to defaults and you re-enter them once. Configuration only — no user data is lost.
Steps
- Back up your database — standard before any extension swap.
- In Admin → Extensions, disable
resofire/digest-mail.
Disable only — do not use any "uninstall / purge data" option and do not run php flarum migrate:reset, as those would drop the shared digest_* tables.
- Swap the Composer package and migrate:
composer require ernestdefoe/digest-mail
composer remove resofire/digest-mail
php flarum migrate
php flarum assets:publish
php flarum cache:clear
- In Admin → Extensions, enable "Digest Email".
- Re-enter your settings in the admin panel — subscribers are already preserved, only the admin configuration needs setting again.
