How to manage notifications in Windows 10

Introduction and notification settings

Alerts and notifications should be a bit less annoying in Windows 10, and they can be much more than simple pop-up boxes. And if you don't want to be interrupted by alerts popping up on screen, you can send them to the Action Centre – that's the Windows 10 version of the Windows Phone notification centre, which will also seem familiar to iOS and Android users. You can turn off notification banners or just ignore them, and they'll be saved in the Action Centre until you dismiss them there.

Desktop programs like Office 2016 along with Windows Store apps (as well as Windows itself) use this new notification system. Notifications are grouped by app, and the apps that have the most recent notifications are at the top of the list.

You can collapse a group of notifications if you want to dismiss all of them, or get rid of them one at a time by swiping them off to the side, or by clicking at the side of the notification where the delete icon appears when you hover the mouse. Tapping or clicking the notification itself will open the app, although often you won't get the exact message that the notification is about, just the app itself. For Outlook 2016, oddly, selecting a notification deletes it rather than opening your email (perhaps because it's a desktop rather than a Store app).

Turning them off

If you don't want to see notifications from a specific app, you can right-click on its notifications in the Action Centre and choose 'Turn off notifications for this app', but this won't stop pop-up alerts and sounds from the program. To tackle that, right-click and choose 'Go to notification settings', or open the Settings app and choose Notifications & Actions under System Settings. Get used to visiting this section, because you can't usually manage notifications directly from an app unless it has its own separate notification system.

The first half of the Notifications section consists of general settings concerning whether you want notifications at all; scroll down to see the list of which apps are using the Windows notification system. Tap or click the toggle to turn notifications off completely for an app, or select the name of the app to choose whether you want to hear sounds, see banners (if you turn that off, alerts will still show up in the Alert Centre) or not get any notifications.

If you don't see the app you want to manage notifications for, leave it running until you get a notification from it – it won't show up in Settings until it gets a notification for the first time.

If you use multiple accounts with the Mail app, you can configure notifications for each of them separately. What you set in the Notifications and Actions pane of the Settings app applies to the account you have open in the inbox, so make your choices, then go back to Mail and open the other account and change the notification settings again.

Smarter toast

Apps can check what you do in the Action Centre and stay in sync with it, so you might see the unread message count on the tile for your message app change on the Start menu if you dismiss the notifications for your new messages from the Action Centre – because you already know there are new messages and the tile doesn't need to tell you anymore.

As far back as Outlook 2010, Windows has had pop-up notifications that let you take actions straight away; incoming mail used to trigger a 'toast' that also let you delete the message straight away. Those kind of options are coming back, with tools any developer can use to add smart notifications to their universal app. Toasts can have multiple lines of text (which you'll probably have to expand to read), images and action buttons – including text boxes for replying to messages, straight from the alert.

Not many apps have these yet, but they're coming soon, for example in the Windows 10 Tweetium app for Twitter.

Because they will be the same on Windows 10 and on phones running Windows Mobile, there are some notifications that will work a little differently: reminders, alarms and incoming calls (for VoIP apps like Skype). Those have bigger images in the alerts – alarms and reminders can have snooze and dismiss buttons and alarms can play looping audio rather than just a short sound (so it will still be playing if you've walked away and come back to your device). But they also stay on screen until you dismiss them – you can't just ignore them.

• How to make the most of the Settings and Action Center in Windows 10

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