You can set up a bot/tool in toolforge or other places to check your watchlist (it would need your watchlist token) and send you email for any new change. That would make it go through toolforge mail servers instead of production.

Seriously? I can't even come up with a cogent reply. You're seriously suggesting that every person who has email enabled who might not want this change has to figure out how to set up a bot in toolforge to email them?

Get off it mate, you're having a laugh.

This should be the default. Bot edits aren't infallible, and it's only reasonable to expect watchers to review bot activity.

This should be the default.

Not sure I agree that it should be the default. But making it opt-in would probably be reasonable, especially if we can find someone to write a patch for this.

Will go ahead and edit the title of this ticket to mention opt in. That will hopefully make this ticket more specific and actionable.

The patch removing the feature should give some good ideas for how to write a patch that adds this back in as a user preference.

The setting to be added would probably best fit in Special:Preferences -> User profile -> Email options. Right beneath "Email me also for minor edits of pages and files", we could add something like "Email me also for bot edits of pages and files"

Having the choice is all that I ask.

I understand that this is not the solution you're asking for, but just in case it helps, let me note that there's an Atom feed (like RSS) available for your watchlist – you can access it by clicking the "Atom" link in the sidebar (it will generate a URL with a secret token that allows accessing your watchlist without logging in).

I don't know what your mail client is, but many of them can be configured to read feeds as well, or you might be able to use one of the many services on the internet that can convert RSS feeds to emails (as long as you don't mind leaking the contents of your watchlist to them) – I haven't tested any myself, so I can't recommend a specific one.

For what it's worth I've made https://watchlistemail.toolforge.org/ to send emails for bot edits. (It will only work on enwiki, ping me if anyone wants it working on another wiki).