Members not receiving emails from Watched category

[mononym]

Hello. A little call-out to the local Discourse sages.

I run into an issue I can't solve. It is about bulk changing user preferences. In a nutshell, there was a change in the default notification settings for our community, and we want that change to propagate to all users. The change is to set a certain category as "watched" for all users and the effect would be that every user gets an email for each new post in that category.

I changed the watched preference via the rails console: User.all.each do |user| CategoryUser.batch_set(user, :watching, [<id>]) end

But the problem is that somehow not all users get an email when there's a new post. So these users have some combination of preferences which blocks the email to be sent.

For a more full history of this issue, I had a now stalled conversation about it on meta.discourse: https://meta.discourse.org/t/members-not-receiving-emails-from-watched-category/314500/3

Now, I just want to try my luck here; maybe somebody knows which gears to turn to make this work.

Thank you !