I know someone worked hard and felt good about completely rewriting the notification system, but it's causing me to feel regularly irritated. I have a strong objection to things redirecting my attention from where I'm focused. Now the new notification system decides what's important enough to cause me to have to focus my attention. I now have a bell icon popping up on my taskbar every time I get mail. I also get notifications that stay on the screen until I close them. What I want is a short timed popup, that goes away on its own but stays in the history list until I delete it. Is there a write up or detailed instructions about how they work, and how I can adjust them?

Right click on the icon -> Configure event Notifications and change it to your needs. History is activated by default.

Thank you for your reply. I do know how to do that. Overall there's a nice fine grain control in the new system.

But it won't do something that it used to do and it interrupts my focus. I do want it to give me a popup, I do want it to show up in history. I don't want it to move the bell icon from the popup with hidden items, onto the active system tray every time I get an email. It does that for every single email I receive, and the icon it shows is a drawing that has lines drawn that signify ringing, which I can't stop perceiving as urgent or as a need to take action.

That means I either have to interrupt my flow to click on the taskbar to make it go away, or I have to learn to ignore that icon and not realize another important notice may have occurred. In other words I lose the function of that icon showing up in the taskbar. So I marked it as always hidden. But now for all other notifications I don't get the use of that icon.

Check the bottom of that configuration window, where you can configure the individual applications how to behave with notifications, and disable it for the Mails, as easy as that...