Microsoft Teams is incredibly useful for workplace collaboration, but if you are constantly getting bombarded with popups for every single chat message, reaction, and channel mention, it can completely destroy your productivity. Thankfully, Teams allows you to customize exactly what deserves an alert and what should be kept quiet.
How to Customize Global Notifications in Teams
If you want to stop the constant popup banners across the entire app, you should adjust your global settings.
- Open the Microsoft Teams desktop application.
- Click on the three-dot menu (…) next to your profile picture in the top right corner of the app.
- Select Settings from the drop-down menu.
- On the left-hand sidebar, click on Notifications and activity.
- Here, you will see a detailed dashboard. You can click “Edit” next to specific categories like Chat or Meetings.
- To stop popups, change the dropdown menus for messages and mentions from “Banner and feed” to “Only show in feed” (which means the alert will quietly sit in your activity bell icon) or “Off” entirely.
How to Mute a Specific Chat or Channel
Sometimes you don’t want to turn off all notifications; you just want to silence one particularly noisy group chat that is distracting you.
- To Mute a Chat: Find the chat in your list on the left side of the screen. Right-click the chat name and select Mute. You will no longer receive popups for this conversation, but you can still click on it to read the messages when you have free time.
- To Mute a Channel: Go to the Teams tab, right-click the specific channel name, and select Channel notifications. Choose Off to stop getting alerts when people post in that specific channel.
How to Stop “Missed Activity” Emails
If Teams is flooding your Outlook inbox with emails reminding you about messages you haven’t read yet, you can stop this easily. Go back to Settings > Notifications and activity. Scroll down to the Email section, find the “Missed activity emails” dropdown, and change it to Off.