Outlook: Turn Off Notifications

The theme for the last week on this blog has been email management. This morning I ran across a LifeHacker blog post that was talking about the same thing. See “Top 10 Tricks for Dealing with Email Overload.”

That post reminded me that I’ve been wanting to show you how to turn off Outlook 2010 email notifications – that little popup box that appears in the lower right corner of your screen when a new email comes in.

If you’re like my colleague Deb M., you are able to completely tune it out and ignore it. If you’re like me, you see it, and if it’s more interesting that the task you’re currently working on, you click the popup and read the message. And then spend the next half hour crafting the perfect response to it, gleefully ignoring the less interesting task while still feeling like you’re working.

I finally just turned it off the notification.

In Outlook 2010, click “File”, then “Options”. Click “Mail” to bring up this screen:

In the message arrival section, uncheck the “Display a Desktop Alert” box. Done. If you want to get rid of the little envelope icon that appears in your taskbar (the row of icons in the lower right part of your screen), then uncheck the box right above that one, “Show and envelope icon in the taskbar.”