When you’re using Microsoft Teams, you’ll get notifications about certain actions you make from within the app. This is by design, as you don’t want to miss an important message from a coworker, or a reply from the boss. Even so, sometimes things might get a little too annoying. You might be getting too many notifications at once, and your feed might be a little too messy. Here’s a look at how you can clean up and manage your notifications in Microsoft Teams for desktop.
Turn off notifications for a certain conversation
With Microsoft Teams, once you reply or leave a message in a channel, you will get follow up notifications about a reply to it. If you’re in multiple threads, this will end up filling up your notifications feed. Luckily, you can turn off the notifications for a specific conversation to avoid this mess.
To do this, go to the thread where your message was in Teams, click on the right side where the . . . is, and then choose to Turn off notifications. You’ll no longer be notified about this specific conversation, but you’ll still receive other notifications such as channel mentions or private messages.
Keep notifications inside Teams
One of the features of Microsoft Teams is a special notification tile that appears on the bottom right side of your screen on Windows 10. You’ll get this whenever you get a private message, or when you get a reply to your thread. If this annoys you, these can be turned off.
Simply click your profile picture, choose Settings, then click Notifications. You’ll then want to select Only show in feed when you go to notification settings as we described in the previous section. This will send all your notifications to your activity feed, which you can find at the top left corner of Teams. Keep in mind, though, that the app will still show notifications in your Windows 10 taskbar, but no pop-ups will show.
Turning off channel notifications
By default, channel mentions are turned off in Microsoft Teams, and new posts in a channel will only show in Activity. However, if you turned it on by mistake, you might want to turn it back off. To do this, you can open up the channel that you’re getting notifications for, and choose the More options . . . at the right. From there, select channel notifications and select the off option where it says all new posts.
Turning off email notifications
One of the features of Microsoft Teams is email notifications. If you’re mentioned, have a new private chat message, or a highlight, you might end up getting emails about it. Be default, most times, the email will only show up if you’ve ignored the in-app notification in Teams. However, you can turn these email notifications off entirely.
Like the rest of the settings in Teams, you can do this by clicking your profile picture, Settings, and then click Notifications. From here, to turn off the email notifications, click the down arrow next to each notification type and choose either Banner or Only show in feed. If you don’t want any email notifications, you’ll want to make sure all activity types are set to this.
Turning off notifications when active on desktop
If you have Teams installed on both your desktop and your mobile device, you might end up getting dual notifications on both devices for some of the same activities in Teams. There is a way to manage notifications in Microsoft Teams from the iOS and Android apps though, so you’ll only get notified when you’re not active on your desktop.
In order to manage notifications in Microsoft Teams, you’ll need to go to the Teams app on iOS and Android, and tap the hamburger menu on the left side of the app; it looks like three horizontal lines. After that, click Settings, followed by notifications. You’ll then want to tap on the option which says Only when inactive on desktop. You’ll also see additional controls, too, for quiet hours and more. We’ll be diving a bit deeper into these other options in a later post.
Microsoft has plenty of helpful documentation available if you need more help in Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Teams for Windows 10 is available to download directly here.
We’ve got you covered!
These are all the ways you can manage your notifications in Microsoft Teams, but there’s a lot more to Teams than just notifications. We’ve covered all kinds of Microsoft Teams topics extensively over the past few months. Check out our Microsoft Teams news hub for more, and be sure to keep it tuned to OnMSFT for all your Microsoft 365 news and information.
