Question Email Notification

I have two questions about email notifications.  I am trying to integrate Kunena with my Dadamail email discussion list.  I have these questions about how Kunena works;

1) My subscribers can see messages from 1 of 2 catagories on my board.  The users establish an account when they subscribe to Joomla.  It seems the defaults is not being subscribed to the topic, so they can see the messages and reply to them, but they are not receiving notifications of new messages.  Is there a way to automatically subscribe new users to the catagories so that they will receive notifications.  Otherwise, what do I change on the database to subscribe the user to a topic.

2) This part is harder.  Since I am trying to integrate Kunena to my email discussion list (Dadamail), messages to the list come from 2 sources
               a) Messages added to Kunena.  I wrote a program that looks for these messages and converts them to an email and sends it to the discussion list.  Kunena sends a notification as desired--easy
             b) email from the discussion list--My program takes these emails and extracts the messages and adds them to the Kunena database and makes the necessary links.  This works as it should.  The messages appear on the web forum as they should.  My problem is that Kunena does not send an email notification about them.  How do I trigger Kunena to send an email notification when I add these messages.

I appreciate any help with these problems.
Thanks,
Michael 

1) Configuration - Subscriptions

The users establish an account when they subscribe to Joomla.  It seems the defaults is not being subscribed to the topic, so they can see the messages and reply to them, but they are not receiving notifications of new messages.  Is there a way to automatically subscribe new users to the catagories so that they will receive notifications.

This is not set by default and is not planned, as it would be spam if users automatically received subscription emails.
Category subscriptions can be assigned to users in Backend -> Kunena -> Users, but this has to be done manually.
There is also an extension (I have not tested it) for automatic subscriptions. kubik-rubik.de/ask-auto-subscription-for-kunena
In any case, the users should agree to this.

1) Rich, thank you for answering question # 1.  Note members of my forums must specifically sign up and be approved to access them, they are not open to the general public.  They understand that they will get email.  I missed the menu setting that allowed me to subscribe them to a category but now I see it.  I also saw how to do it by manually editing "kunena_user_categories" setting the "user #", "category id" and "subscribe" fields. But doing this on the backend interface is much easier.

2) This leaves me to question # 2.  How do I tell Kunena to send a notification when I insert a message in the database.  This is done by adding to the message to the databases at "kunena_messages", "kunena_messages_text", "kunena_categories", "kunena_topics", "kunena_user_topics".  Obviously, I am missing something because email notifications are not being sent out when messages are added in this fashion.  So, my question is, how does Kunena know to send out a new message notification when it receives a new message.  When looking at the database at "kunena_messages", I notice that the messages from Kunena have the fields "modify_by" and "modify_time" filled in while they are null in the inserted messages.  Do I need to have values on these fields to activate notification or is it something else.

Thanks.
Michael

Is your forum in read only mode? If not, it would make no sense to write the posts directly to the database.
I don't have a solution for sending emails, but if your question is related to read-only mode, you can work around that.
If there are not too many categories in your forum, instead of using the "read only" mode, you could manage it via the category permission.
User Groups Allowed To Post
and
User Groups Allowed To Reply
If you allow this Admins only, no other users (except Admins and Moderators) can write in the forum.
But this setting needs in all categories.
If you then publish the posts in the frontend, the mails will also be sent.

Thanks for responding.
No, the forum is NOT in Read-only mode.

Let me make it clear what I am trying to do:
1) I have external discussion list with 5,000 users on it. It runs on Dadamail. The discussion lists (Npsych and Neuro) work well as a discussion list, but it does not have a nice webforum interface that allows users to reply to messages. Users communicate to Dadamail by sending email to the list address which then sends it to all the members of the list.
2) I have setup Kunena to allow for a nice webforum interface for the list. So, it mirrors the list, the categories are Neuro and Npsych corresponding to the two discussion lists on Dadamail. I have 100 users on the Kunena forum. The bulk of the messages from these discussion lists are sent to the dadamail as an email and only an occasional message comes from a user using the Kunena webforum. So, when an email is sent to dadamail it adds the message to the dadamail archive database.
3) I wrote a PHP program (Forrun) that runs as a cron job, that reads the dadamail archive database and extracts the new messages and writes them to the Kunena database as described in my previous message. These messages now appear in Kunena as they should. However, messages entered this way do not generate email notifications for the Kunena forum members, so they do not know that a new message has been sent. I would like to be able to trigger email notifications for messages that are coming from Dadamail. Now if there was an interface that took an email message and wrote it to the Kunena forum that would accomplish what I am trying to do.

Hopefully you understand what I am trying to do. There probably is a routine in Kunena that tells it that there is a new message. I need to trigger that.

Thanks,
Michael