Moodle provides the option to "subscribe" to discussion forums so that you will receive an email whenever someone posts a message in that forum. If you do not wish to receive these emails, you can prevent them by changing your Profile and/or Forum settings. (See note below regarding messages sent via the news forum.)

Unsubscribe from a Forum

To unsubscribe from a forum:

1. Open the forum.
2. Click on the admin gear in the upper right corner to access the forum options menu.
3. Scroll down and click on Unsubscribe from this forum.

Optional Subscriptions

Instructors have the option of subscribing to any forum. For instance, you may wish to subscribe to a course Q&A forum in order to be notified that a student has posted a question. (Be sure to resist replying to the email notice, however, and reply in Moodle so that all students will benefit from your response!) Students may subscribe to a forum, if they wish, if you leave the forum's default subscription setting at "Optional." To subscribe to a forum, click on the link labeled Subscribe to this forum in the forum admin menu.

You may set up a forum so that everyone is subscribed without having the option to unsubscribe. This option is called Forced subscription.

Note: The Announcements forum is the one forum from which students cannot unsubscribe. Everyone in the course will receive an email when you post to this forum. It's helpful to know, too, that this is not a true forum—it's one-way communication for instructors to post announcements for course participants. Students cannot reply to an Announcements forum posting.

Subscribe to a Thread

In addition to subscribing to an entire forum, you also have the option of following individual threads. Click on the gray envelope to the right of the subject line to subscribe to the thread. The envelope will  change color to indicate that you have subscribed to it as shown below.

Manage Subscriptions

You can view a list of those subscribed to a forum by opening the forum admin menu as shown above and selecting the Show/edit forum subscribers link.

To unsubscribe users, click on the Turn editing on button in the upper right corner. Select the names of those who wish to be unsubscribed and click on Remove. (Note: If the forum is set for Forced subscription, editing is not an option.)

Disable Auto-Subscribe (for accounts created prior to May 2015)

Note: Prior to Fall term 2015, the Moodle profile default was set to auto-subscribe you to a forum once you posted to it. Accounts created since May 2015 do not have this setting by default.

If you have an older account and are getting lots of email from forums, you can disable this setting (and stop future automatic subscriptions) by using the following instructions:

1. Open the user menu next to your name in the top right corner of any Moodle page.
2. Click on Preferences.
3. Click on the Forum preferences link under User account in the left column.
4. Locate the Forum Auto-Subscribe field and use the pull-down menu to change the setting to No: don't automatically subscribe me to forums.

This setting will apply to future forums in which you post in all of your courses. If you are currently subscribed to a forum, you must unsubscribe yourself as shown below. Note: These steps need to be taken in all of your current courses where you have posted to a discussion forum and generated a subscription.

Bonus Tip: Set the Forum tracking option to Yes, highlight new posts for me. This setting indicates when new messages have been posted course participants.