Now we only have two choices:
“Email me when someone replies” - then we get a mailbox full of messages for a single active thread, which bury the other content and we have to go back and delete without accidentally deleting something important.
“Stop emailing replies to me” - No benefit from the email notification system.
I propose that we only get an email notification of the first unread reply since the last time we read or posted in that topic. That way, we would stay on top of what threads have been active while we were away, but we aren’t inundated.
The only disadvantages are that we cannot read the threads from our mailbox, and we wouldn’t know how many replies there have been - it could just be one reply from some bonehead (no offense to boneheads[:P]). If the latter is a problem, we could have subsequent notifications after a certain number of unread replies have accumulated, such as one notification for each 10 or 20 unread replies after the first unread one. So for the popular threads you’d only get 5 or 10 mails a day instead of 100.