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Possible Duplicates:
slow email notification
Instant email alerts and notifications

The option under an asked question says that Notify <emailaddress> daily of any new answers, so it is clear that in case of new answers email will be send on daily basis..

WHY?

In today's world where every site is getting more interactive why is this great helper site not mailing the person who asked the question as soon as the question gets any answers?

This feature would really help, because I think the majority of people here have questions that arise during work, so the sooner they get the answer the better.

Till then I refresh my question's page every 5 minutes or so, :-s

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    As an aside, you can subscribe to a question's RSS feed so that you will see (in your reader) any new answers, more or less instantly.
    – Daniel Daranas
    Commented Feb 11, 2010 at 14:24

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As Jeff noted in the last podcast:

  • I am not a fan of email, to put it mildly, as I wrote in Is Email = Efail and Email: The Variable Reinforcement Machine. Given my discomfort with email, I struggle with the role of email on Stack Overflow — mostly trying to keep it at arms’ length while using it appropriately.
  • I agree with Joel’s position here, which is that aggressive email notifications are toxic to the growth of a community. That’s why our email notifications are somewhat.. slow. It’s intentional.

I doubt bandwidth considerations are taken into account here as email notifications are explicitly opt-in per question, therefore Google will probably still gulp the majority of the bandwidth with the emails (even if sent out once per answer) pretty negligible.

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