I sent this to the Editor Engagement list but maybe here there is more people interested.

On 08/20/2013 06:39 AM, Quim Gil wrote:

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.

After a bit of investigation:

- Indeed, there seems to be no extension doing this.

- Translatewiki.net does have a newsletter and users can opt-in/out from their preferences, but according to Siebrand it is a very hackish/adhoc approach involving manual SQL queries and Mailman.

- According to Kaldari, the basic implementation as an extension should be pretty simple, not even requiring Echo. The building blocks are already provided by plain MediaWiki.

As I see it, this could have two levels of implementation:

1. Just one site-wide notification from admins that users can opt-in from their preferences.

2. Possibility for a determinate user group to add more topics (e.g. New release announcements, Activities for contributors...) and allow people to subscribe to them.

Do you see interesting for mediawiki.org and/or wikitech.wikimedia.org? For any other Wikimedia sites? For your own MediaWiki? I can't develop this but I would be happy to volunteer as PM & tester (here and/or in my personal pet project).