Hi Barkuti and everyone else, sorry for my slow reply in this thread.
I do appreciate the idea, and I apologize for the inconveniences caused by deleted posts. I think the benefits of post deletion (but not entire thread deletion) outweigh the annoyances. If post deletion is disabled, the email links will indeed still work, but if the user changes the post to “[deleted]” or something it won’t really be any less annoying.
Of course, Barkuti’s suggestion of a delay before sending out the email would be the best solution. But unfortunately that would be prohibitively difficult to implement. The thing is, this forum software doesn’t have a good email notification system that fits our forum’s needs, so I had to cobble together a custom system myself. Using that same basic framework, I can’t think of a way to delay the notification email and check if the post still exists.
Sorry I can’t be of more help!