Outlook helps you get informed about new emails by using several methods to notify you. Here are all of the ways you can be notified. Outlook uses the following four methods to notification you about new emails:
- Playing a sound
- Changing the mouse pointer
- Showing an email icon in the taskbar
- Displaying a banner notification in the bottom right of the screen (top right for Mac users)
All of these can be turned off completely.
Launch the Outlook application and then go to File > Options > Mail and scroll down to the “Message Arrival” section.
The "Message arrival" settings in the Options panel.
You can turn any of the notifications on or off by checking or unchecking the corresponding boxes. Click the “OK” button to close the Options panel when you’re done.
What if you want your notification to be a bit less annoying or untimely? Using Focus Assist on Windows 10
Focus Assist in-depth, but here’s what you need to do to make sure it does what you want for Outlook.
HOW TO OPEN FOCUS ASSIST
- Press Windows+i on your keyboard to open up the Settings panel,
- Search for “Focus Assist,”
- Select “Focus Assist Settings” from the dropdown menu.
Scroll down to the “Automatic Rules” section and turn on the options you want to enable.
The "Automatic rules" section of Focus Assist.
Each option allows either “Priority Only” or “Alarms Only,” which can be amended by clicking the option and changing the “Focus Level.”
An example of the "Focus level" dropdown.
“Alarms” specifically refers to alarms generated by clock or notification apps. If you don’t want to be disturbed at all, you can set the option to “Priority Only” and remove all priority apps.
You can additionally customize “During These Times” by clicking on it and changing the time options.
The time options in the "During these times" rule.
This is useful if you want Focus Assist turned on only at certain times of the day or just weekdays and/or weekends.
Windows Notifications and Actions
In addition to Focus Assist, there are Outlook notification settings available in Windows. In the Settings menu (Windows+i keys), search for “Notifications” or, if you’re already looking at Focus Assist, choose “Notifications > Actions” from the left-hand menu.
The "Notifications >; actions" menu option.
Scroll down the list of apps until you find “Outlook” and then click it to open the application’s Notification settings.
The Outlook app option.
You can change whether banners are displayed (the same setting as “Display a Desktop notification” in Outlook’s Options > Mail) or whether a sound is played (the same setting as “Play A Sound” in Outlook’s Options > Mail), but the other options are specific to the Notification in the Actions panel.
The first two unique options are whether you want notifications displayed in the Action Center (by default, this is enabled), and whether you want to hide notifications from appearing on the lock screen (by default, this is disabled).
Two of the options in the Outlook notifications options.
The second set of unique options are how many Outlook notifications are visible in the Action Center (1, 3, 5, 10, or 20), and where in the priority list Outlook notifications are shown in the Action Center.
The Action Centre options for Outlook.
These settings won’t change Outlook’s behavior, but they’ll change what Windows does with the banner notifications and how it shows Outlook notifications in the Action Center.
Change the notification Sound
Also never forget to set the kind of sound you love to alert you when any mail drops.
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