Channel notifications vs notification settings

Recently the new “Channel notifications” setting rolled out to all tenants. Now users have the ability to set different notification setting per channel. Before this setting, you had the option to only set this for all channels:

• Banner and email
• Banner
• Only show in feed

If you then choose to follow a channels you would get the same notification setting for all of them.

This was done from your profile picture -> Settings -> Notifications:

With the new “Channel notifications” option you have the following options:

• Off ( don’t follow )
• Banner and feed
• Only show in feed

You can also set if you want to be notified of replies for messages. This is very welcome since it’s often tedious to get all those too, since they more than often just something like “OK” or “Great”

Alright, so far so good! But what about that old notification setting for “Followed channels”? (See first picture)

I had a question regarding this recently. What if this setting is set to “banner” and then you set to “only show in feed” on the Channel notification setting?

These settings  can contradict each other in several ways, so I tried this out!

I set the old notifications settings to banner and email and then the channel notifications setting to the only feed option!

It appears that Teams don’t use the old setting anymore at all! This is okay since the point of the new setting is that this should be set per channel now! But what about email? Teams won’t care if you set the “banner and email” option, and in “Channel notifications” there’s no option for email at all! My tests also shows indeed that there are no email sent anymore for channel messages!

Conclusion:

Forget about the “Followed channels settings in the notifications pane in Teams! Only use the new “channel Notifications” setting regarding channels! Also email won’t be sent as of the time of this writing!

Microsoft will probably remove the old setting to avoid confusion ahead! Hopefully they will also add the option to have an email sent for channel messages, in the “Channel notifications” pane!