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I've subscribed to the Stack Overflow, Super User, Programmers, Gaming & Meta newsletters.

It's 22:44 UTC+5:30, and yet

  • Meta, Stack Overflow & Super User newsletter is yet to be delivered
  • Programmers was delivered about 15 minutes ago
  • Gaming newsletter was delivered on Friday

Can we please have the newsletters delivered on a particular date, at fixed time?

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    I requested this behaviour, and it was implemented a few days ago.
    – Jeremy
    Commented Aug 1, 2011 at 17:21
  • mm, that explains why this week's newsletters are delayed, so to speak Commented Aug 1, 2011 at 17:26

2 Answers 2

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Please see this feature request where this behavior was changed from what you're requesting to a system with different dates for each newsletter. Note the accepted answer describes how the arrival date is chosen for your newsletters. Specifically,

Instead, newsletters will be staggered across the workweek on a per-user basis: your first newsletter subscription will arrive on Tuesdays*, your second on Thursdays, third on Mondays, fourth Wednesdays, and fifth on Fridays. Your sixth subscription will loop back to Tuesdays, and so on.

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We've been discussing this in chat; the change to stop distributing the newsletter at the same time seems terrible. It's unclear if the newsletter covers questions last week (i.e. Sunday-Saturday) or over the last 7 days. If it's the former then everyone gets the same newsletter, but some people get it Monday and some people get it Friday -- why are these people forced to wait four days for something they could read right now? If it's the latter, there's no concept of "the second SO newsletter in August" -- everyone gets a slightly different newsletter depending on the moment they were e-mailed.

Either way, this seems far worse than everyone getting the same newsletter at the same time. If some people are getting a bunch of newsletters at once and can't read them all, they can move them into a separate folder and come back to them later. I've never heard of a site changing the way it delivers e-mail so that people get messages in their inbox at a slower rate -- no e-mail client requires you to read an incoming message immediately or lose it. It's like only showing one question per minute on the SO homepage because some people read slow

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  • "everyone gets a slightly different newsletter depending on the moment they were e-mailed" and why would this be bad? Commented Aug 1, 2011 at 21:42
  • @Jeff You can't refer to questions in a previous newsletter, because you're the only one that got it. It's like trying to discuss newspaper stories with your friends except everyone got a different newspaper with different stories in it Commented Aug 1, 2011 at 22:03
  • is that really a realistic scenario? Discussion of the questions with others? Also, the "greatest hits" in a 2 or 3 day timeframe will tend to be very much the same on almost all SE 2.0 sites. Commented Aug 1, 2011 at 22:04
  • @Jeff I link people to questions on a regular basis. I guess whether or not the other people got the questions in their newsletter doesn't matter Commented Aug 1, 2011 at 22:10
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    It's worth noting that newsletters already potentially vary from person to person, if a "can you answer" block is included (and it will always be, provided there are available questions to populate it with). Commented Aug 1, 2011 at 22:19

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