you could fairly easily accomplish this with the forum hooks (I would wait for the 4.0.1 added ones). On every topic creation you could easily email your membership list with the new topic including subscription links.

I can open a ticket for consideration but it would be 4.1 at the earliest and I cant make any promises.

No worries, no hurries. I already had a hunch that there'd be PHP hooks someplace, but I've also read that fiddling with automated notification type emails very easily breaks WP's own notifications (e.g. new member, new comments on the blog) so that's why I shamelessly dropped the low, low, low priority idea here. Plus, in the interim I get to glare and say people are supposed to regularly check the forum – hehe! Thanks for at least considering it, even though it's of marginal interest to overall users of Simple:Press.

this would have no effect on wp’s notifications. when the new topic hook (in 4.0.1) is fired, you could just query the members table and email (using php sendmail) each one the new topic with link for subscription.

but, understand… its on the list for future consideration.

Hi Guys,

Is it possible to do this yet with the latest 4.4.1 version? We have lost several of our top contributers to the forum since we migrated to SP from Google Groups, simply because they cannot receive notices via email, so if this is now possible, it would be GREAT!

Please advise,

not directly within simple press.  as mentioned above, you could use hooks to accomplish.  and when 5.0 releases, the plugin api will make it easier.