Digest Emails

New in 4.0.0. The digest is a recurring email listing the new posts from the writers a member follows.

It is off by default, at two levels. The site owner has to switch it on, and each member has to opt in individually. Switching it on does not start mailing anybody who has not asked for it.

Turning It On for the Site

Go to Member Blog > Content, find Digest email, and set it to On. Choose a frequency next to it:

Setting	Default	Options
Digest email	Off	Off, On
Frequency	Weekly	Weekly, Daily

Changing the frequency re-books the schedule. Switching the digest off clears the scheduled job entirely, so a site owner who turns it off stops getting digests.

Who Receives One

A member gets a digest only if all of these are true:

The site owner has switched the digest on.
The member follows at least one writer.
The member’s own digest notification preference is on. It defaults to off.
Those writers have published something since that member’s last digest.

Nobody is ever sent an empty digest. If nothing new has been published, no email goes out. A recurring “here is nothing” email is the fastest way to get a site’s mail marked as spam, and once a sending domain is marked, every other email the site sends goes with it.

The first digest a member receives covers the last period only (the last week, or the last day), not everything their follows have ever written.

Members Opting In

The digest is the only notification in the plugin that defaults to off. Every other one is a reply to something the member did - they wrote a post, somebody clapped it, somebody invited them to co-author. A digest is unsolicited recurring mail, which is a different thing to put in a person’s inbox.

In 4.0.0 there is no checkbox on the member-facing settings screen for the digest yet. Pro’s Author Dashboard notification tab lists the older preferences (published, comments, co-author invitations, approvals, reactions, milestones, rejections) but not the digest. Until it does, a member can be opted in only in code:

// Opt one member in.
bpmb_notification_prefs()->set( $user_id, 'digest', true );

Or change the default for everyone who has never saved a preference:

add_filter( 'bpmb_notification_pref_defaults', function ( $defaults ) {
    $defaults['digest'] = true;
    return $defaults;
} );

If you do that, be sure you can justify it: the unsubscribe link still works, but opting members into recurring mail they did not ask for is what gets a domain blocklisted.

Unsubscribing

Every email the plugin sends carries a one-click unsubscribe link, and it works without logging in.

That is the whole design constraint. A member who wants out is already annoyed; a link that dumps them on a login screen so they can navigate to a settings tab does not get clicked. The Spam button does, and that is the one that costs you.

The link is signed, so it cannot be forged, and it switches off exactly one kind of email. The confirmation page says which one, confirms the member’s other notifications are unchanged, and offers a link to manage the rest (when Pro’s Author Dashboard is available).

The link does not expire - an unsubscribe link in an email from eight months ago still works. It stops working if the member changes their password.

Notification Preferences

The digest is one of a set of preferences the plugin keeps per member. All of them are respected by every email and on-site notification the plugin sends.

Preference	Default
Your post is published	On
New comment on your post	On
Co-author invitation	On
Post approved or rejected	On
Someone claps your post	On
Post view milestone	On
Someone follows you	On
A writer you follow publishes	On
Digest	Off

Each has a matching on-site (BuddyPress) notification preference.

Members edit these under Author Dashboard > Notifications, which is part of the Author Dashboard module in Pro. Without Pro there is no member-facing screen for them, and every member gets the defaults above.