Couple of suggestions -
Set up an announcement forum for important news and force email subscription. Users can choose to the override their default digest setting for individual forums but it’s quite hidden! Go to yourmoodle/mod/forum/index.php?id=2 (change the 2 to a valid courseid) or use id=1 for site forums. If you’re comfortable with Sal queries, you can set the preferences for your Announcements forum to ”Individual posts” for all users in the database.
OR
(speaking as a former UoD staff member), you could create an email group and then create a dummy user on Moodle with the group email address - so you post to the Moodle forum, and the forum send an email to the group ;)
Set up an announcement forum for important news and force email subscription. Users can choose to the override their default digest setting for individual forums but it’s quite hidden! Go to yourmoodle/mod/forum/index.php?id=2 (change the 2 to a valid courseid) or use id=1 for site forums. If you’re comfortable with Sal queries, you can set the preferences for your Announcements forum to ”Individual posts” for all users in the database.
OR
(speaking as a former UoD staff member), you could create an email group and then create a dummy user on Moodle with the group email address - so you post to the Moodle forum, and the forum send an email to the group ;)