Upon account creation or in your user profile: "Send me important email updates"
You have seen this feature in many collaborative sites, but not in Wikimedia sites. Unless I'm missing something, this common feature doesn't seem to be available in MediaWiki core or through extensions. Users can get notifications based on activity on wiki pages and they can also get emails from another users, but is there a way for an admin to send an update or a newsletter via email to all users that ticked the box?
While new users will be hardly used to watchlists or user talk pages, and while it will be difficult for them to find the Wikimedia blog, The Signpost, etc... all of them have email and a nice % would be happy to receive emails from time to time with interesting information. Has this option been discussed?
PS: as a mediawiki.org admin I wish we had something like this to engage new and old contributors.