A web-only user on a deployment running neither the Android app nor Discord gets
no notification that someone replied to their own thread — which is most users on
most deployments, and a forum where replies are invisible is a forum nobody
returns to. Email is a third consumer of the recipient set the previous commit
builds, not a fourth pipeline.
Unlike a push tickle, an email carries content: a mailbox is a destination the
recipient chose, not an untrusted relay reached by an unguessable topic. It
carries a title and an excerpt, never a full post.
The digest COMPUTES AT SEND TIME and keeps no pending-items queue. The only state
is `last_digest_at`. Three properties fall out, and the third is why it was chosen:
a deployment down for two days sends one correct digest rather than replaying a
backlog; a post a moderator hid after it was written is simply not in the query;
and a user who lost forum access between the post and the send is no longer in
the recipient set, so they are not emailed content they can no longer read.
`last_digest_at` is stamped only on a SUCCESSFUL send — stamping first would
quietly eat a day of somebody's notifications every time the mail provider had a
bad minute.
One-click unsubscribe is a stateless HMAC rather than a token table. Every
property that makes a password-reset token a row is absent: the link sits in a
mailbox for months so it has no useful expiry, and clicking it twice must mean
what clicking it once meant. Its whole capability is setting `muted` for one
(user, Team) pair.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
wtclaude
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