Moodle forum and 60,000 email notifications

[CyberNerd]

We have setup some rather large metacourses for entire year groups.
The students are being taught using the moodle forums feature.

By default, students are sent email notification on every post.
The result is 250 students (a yeargroup) each posting one message to 250 students
250*250= 62500 emails.

Although Zimbra coped rather well with this unexpected load, it would be preferable if everyone wasn't spammed for each and every posting.

I can set the mysql to

mysql> UPDATE mdl_user SET maildigest=2;

which sets everyones profile to only receive daily updates of subject posts, but any idea how I do this as default, or stop email notification of forums site-wide.

I want to keep emails generally though, as it's useful for messaging classes.

[danIT]

Might be better to change the setting on your forums, rather than the users to fix the problem short term?

So instead of forcing everyone to be subscribed to each forum, i presume the news forum is causing the most spam, change it so they have to choose to recieve emails.

Then, visit this link and it will enable you to set a default setting for any new course created or existing course,

https://studydirect.sussex.ac.uk/downloads/

Its also a rather good admin mod!!!