require users to opt in to get mails and default to not getting emails

I don't think there's any way to do that, so I'm changing this to a feature request.

I agree this is a much needed feature, I can't install this and have it spam people without them choosing to receive emails first. I'd get hundreds of complaints.

I looked at the module some to try and figure out how to do this but have been unsuccessful so far :(

thanks for your time making this module it's very needed.

Thanks for mentioning this. I recently got a comment on a really old thread and users who never requested updates by email got them. So, I'd like to generally repurpose this to default to not sending mail.

That has the drawback of not "bringing people back for community involvement" quite as often but has the distinct benefit of being more legal (at lesat in the US) and being more respectful to site users. I think the benefits outweight the drawbacks ;)

I haven't investigated where this problem is specifically yet but will try to do so in the future.

The mail is sent to everyone (by default) because the database schema sets the "notify me" value to true by default.

Oh is that the key,

then if already installed, i think this will revert all to default notify off

alter table comments modify `notify` tinyint(1) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0';
update comments set notify=0;

and for new installs, changing comment_notify.install to

$status[] = db_query("
ALTER TABLE {comments}
ADD COLUMN `notify` tinyint(1) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0'");

instead of

$status[] = db_query("
ALTER TABLE {comments}
ADD COLUMN `notify` tinyint(1) NOT NULL DEFAULT '1'");

for postgres and mysql would be it..?

Per comment 3 in http://drupal.org/node/244728 this is a critical bug, not a feature request... (that doesn´t mean I have time to spend on it, but that I agree with that perspective).

Ok, I've got a patch to fix this (thanks to stamd in comment #5 for the queries - that helped a lot!).

First, it requires a manual step that I've documented at http://drupal.org/node/252697

Second, it requires a change to the install and all users to run their update.php

I've run this on a site now and it seemed to work. I'd love to get some feedback from other folks before committing it, though.

Ok, I gave this a quick test and it this has been committed to the 5.x branch.

Thanks again, stamd, for your advice.