Outlook For Mac Notifications

With macOS®, app notifications became an integral part of our lives. We get notified about upcoming events, scheduled meetings, emails, Facebook messages, birthdays, and websites we accidentally subscribed to.

Read receipts and delivery notifications are available in only some versions of Outlook for Mac, and only when using an Office 365 work. Contact support within Outlook for Mac. Outlook for Office 365 for Mac Outlook 2016 for Mac Outlook 2019 for Mac More. Contact support is a new way to reach your support agent right within Outlook for Mac. To report issues, report bugs.

Don’t get me wrong, notifications are extremely useful and help optimize workflow.

Ida pro mac hex rays ida pro 7.0 for mac free. But what if sometimes we need quiet time to focus on important tasks, avoid distractions, give a presentation, or simply sleep? How to turn off all the Mac® notifications?

I’ll cover the steps needed to stop getting app notifications in macOS, either all at once or one by one.

1. Disable All Distractions with an App

The easiest way to disable all notifications on Mac is to use Parallels Toolbox. Toolbox is a Swiss-Army knife for MacOS that brings convenience of smartphones to desktop, which allows you not only to switch to Do Not Disturb mode on the fly, but also keep your focus with Presentation Mode that Instantly disables those embarrassing pop-ups or bouncing icons.

The application automatically detects when additional displays are connected and prevent any distractions to occur. Additionally you can quickly get ready for a presentation with easy access to hide a messy desktop or lock screen when you’re done with work.

Here are just a few of other 30+ amazing features of Toolbox:

Download Video – Grab music and videos from Youtube, Vimeo or Facebook and watch them offline.

Clean Drive and Free Memory – Free up extra disk space and keep your Mac optimized for the best performance.

Take Screenshots or Record a Video with a single click for quick cut-and-paste jobs.

You can download Toolbox and try it out for free here (no registration needed).

2. Pause Notifications from Notification Center

To quickly stop receiving notifications until midnight, do the following:

1. Click on the Notification Center icon in the menu bar.
2. Swipe down until you see the Do Not Disturb label.
3. Switch on Do Not Disturb mode.
4. Alternatively, hold down the Option key while you click the Notification Center icon.

When Do Not Disturb is on, the Notification Center icon on the right is dimmed. During that time, the notifications arrive silently in Notification Center until midnight or the scheduled time.

3. Enable Do Not Disturb for Your Preferred Amount of Time

Mac users can specify when they don’t want to be disturbed—as well as set how apps show notifications—with Notifications System Preferences.

To turn off notifications for your preferred time, do the following:

1. From the Apple Menu in the top left corner, open System Preferences.
2. Select Notifications.
3. Stop notifications during the specific time range, when the display is sleeping, or when you’re mirroring the screen.

4. Disable Safari Notifications

Push-up notifications in Safari are a relatively new feature, but more and more websites are offering them. Usually, a user voluntarily subscribes to a website’s notifications from a pop-up window. Sometimes, however, it happens accidentally.

To disable unwanted notifications from a website, do the following:

1. Open Safari and click Safari -> Preferences in the top menu bar.
2. Open the Websites tab.
3. Select Notifications on the left-side menu.
4. Choose which website notifications you want to disable.

Hint: if you need to uninstall apps, it’s not recommended to drag them to the trash as different applications tend to leave lots of unwanted files on you hard drive. It’s best to use a dedicated uninstaller tool, like Toolbox Uninstall Apps. You can download Toolbox and try it out for free here.

5. Turn Off Updates Notifications

The App Store in macOS pushes update notifications for installed apps whenever they become available. To turn them off, you can now simply do the following:

1. Click on the Apple menu in the top bar.
2. Open System Preferences.
3. Find the App Store.
4. Turn off the “Automatically check for updates” option.

That covers all the steps for turning off notifications on your Mac. Make sure to turn them on again when you’re done with your project so you don’t miss any important notifications!

Last Updated: October 2019.

Here’s a question we got from a reader:

I use my Outlook calendar to manage my business meetings and appointments, tasks and contacts; but also my personal appointments, as well as reminders to call friends on their birthday. As such i keep constantly getting reminders and notifications from Outlook on overdue appointments, meetings and tasks which is kind of overwhelming. Once i get a reminder, i typically dismiss it one by one, or dismiss them all. I guess my question is how to disable Outlook calendar reminders so i won’t need to get rid of them manually. I am using Outlook 365 on a Windows 10 computer.

Thanks for the nice question. Although you are using Windows, i have added another section that will be helpful for macOS users.

Disabling appointment reminders on Windows

Completely cancel reminders and notifications

Please proceed as following:

• Open Microsoft Outlook.
• From the upper menu bar, hit File.
• Now hit Options.
• Navigate to the Advanced tab.
• In the Reminders section, uncheck the Show reminders box as shown below.

• Hit OK.

Cancel specific meeting notifications

You are able to get rid of reminders for appointments as well as individual or series of meetings. This will work both for meetings scheduled by 3rd parties or yourself.

Kindly proceed as following:

• In Outlook, navigate to your calendar and double check your meeting.
• In the Reminder combo box, select None, as shown in the screenshot below.
• If you would like to modify a recurring meeting, hit the Recurrence button and adjust the reminder value.
• Once done, hit Save and Close.

Turning off calendar reminders in macOS

Outlook for macOS also allows you to suppress reminders for both individual or recurring appointments and meetings, or for all your calendars.

Disable reminders for specific appointments

• Open Outlook for macOS.
• Navigate to your Calendar.
• If your appointment /meeting/recurrence is already set, double click on it.If the meeting doesn’t yet exist, you’ll need to first create it.
• Set your meeting or appointment reminder to None, as indicated below

• Close and save your appointment.

Disable Reminders for all Outlook calendars

If opting out from reminders of specific event doesn’t meet your specific needs, then you can stop all Outlook notifications by proceeding as described below.

• Open Outlook for MAC.
• On the top macOS bar hit Outlook.
• Then hit Turn off reminders.

Additional reader questions

Shared calendar notifications

You can turn off notifications from shared calendar using the procedures shown above.

Reminders fire to soon, what to do?

Outlook allows you to set a default reminder timing for your calendar meetings and appointment only.

Please proceed as following:

• In Outlook, hit File
• Then hit Options
• Select Calendar
• Set the default reminder time to any time below the default 15 minutes.
• Hit OK.

In case of further questions, feel free to leave us a comment.