Alright, so, if you're interested in the technicals of this website, it's currently operating the 2.0.19 version of
Simple Machines Forum. The version 2.0 online manual is here:
https://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/SMF2.0:Main_Page.
It appears the feature you're talking about is called "SendTopic" and was last worked on/improved in version 2.0.15:
https://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=557176.0. It may need to be improved again in the next version.
Email handling is very, very complex these days, mostly because the creators of email (technically the
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) back in the early 80s really didn't have any idea that spam would become a thing, because it was just a few university and companies that use the protocol back then.
Today most email handling needs to go through a 3rd party email handler if it's coming from a single website, or email services like gmail will throw it straight in the spam folder. This might also be happening if the site is exceeding some quota (but I have no idea).
If you want to get around this, the only thing that the "Send this topic" feature is even doing, is emailing the URL to the topic. You can see this in the URL for sending this topic:
golfclubatlas.com/forum/index.php?action=emailuser;sa=sendtopic;topic=
72868.0
Compare that to the URL on that you are probably looking at this text I'm writing right now:
golfclubatlas.com/forum/index.php/topic,
72868.0.html
or something like:
golfclubatlas.com/forum/index.php/topic,
72868.msg1748845.html#msg1748845
As you can see, the "topic" is simple a reference number, and sending the topic is effectively just sending them the number to the URL page. You can simple paste the URL of the page into an email and it should effectively allow people to reach this page directly. If, however, you want to send the text of the page in a readable format, you can click the "Print" link that is just to the right of the "Send this topic" and copy-paste into an email.
To address Buck's comments, yes, this is a very, very archaic web forum. It's open source, which is good, and means it's going to be effectively free, but it's built on PHP, which has mostly been abandoned (PHP loving tech nerds:
fight me). The
BBCode that the forum uses is also extremely dated, with most web forums using some for of
Markdown. However, all of this is the result of
path dependence. This site was built in the heyday of PHP and SQL, and without a major effort to modify the functionality of the site (modification that would cost money, and probably require some more expensive long term maintenance), it would be very challenging to upgrade. I'm actually really impressed that the site is fully up to data on it's version number (2.0.19) as that means that the operator is actually at least moderately concerned with security. There is another upgrade in store for the forum if we continue down this path, as Simple Machines is now operating version 2.1.4 and the site would just need to be upgraded from the 2.0 family to the 2.1 family.
Web development is hard, and unless you're willing to pay a lot of money (or actively lose money in the case of
my website), open source site frameworks like this are built on the generosity of coders who work on them in their free time. The benefit of a clunky old site like this is it's robustness, but they certainly aren't flashy.