How Notifications Work
The Notifications panel is the side drawer behind the bell icon in the top-right toolbar. This page is the reference for the panel itself: how the list is organized and how new activity reaches you. For everything inside a single item, see Notification Items. For what each kind of notification means, see the type pages linked from the Introduction.
The Bell Button
The button doubles as your unread counter, so you know whether anything needs attention before opening the panel.
From the first unread notification onward, a badge appears on the bell with the count. A few details about how it behaves:
- The count is exact and complete. The badge shows the real number rather than capping at something like
99+, and it counts every unread notification on your account, not just the ones loaded in the panel. - It stays current on its own. The platform re-checks every 10 seconds while you are signed in, so new arrivals raise the count without a page reload.
- It reacts immediately to you. Reading a notification, opening one, or using Mark all read updates the badge right away, without waiting for the next check.
- It clears itself. When the last unread notification is read, the badge disappears and the bell returns to its resting state.
| Icon | Description |
|---|---|
| The resting state: you have no unread notifications. The bell sits outlined, in the default toolbar color. | |
| You have unread notifications. The bell fills in, changes color, and carries a numeric badge with the unread count. |
Panel Layout
The panel has two fixed parts: a header with the controls, and the list itself, organized by date.
Header
The header carries the panel title, a chip reading <N> unread while you have unread notifications (large counts are abbreviated), and the controls below. The three tabs filter the list by read status; each one is a fresh request to the server rather than a filter applied in the browser, so switching tabs also clears any selection you had made.
| Button | Description |
|---|---|
| All | Shows read and unread notifications together. This is the tab the panel opens on. |
| Unread | Shows only the notifications you have not read yet. |
| Read | Shows only the notifications you have already read. This is the persistent history: marking something read moves it here rather than discarding it. |
| Mark all read | Marks every unread notification as read in one action. Disabled when nothing is unread, and hidden while items are selected or while you are on the Read tab. See Mark All as Read. |
| Close | Closes the panel. The next time it opens, it starts back on the All tab. |
Date Grouping
The list runs newest first, and instead of one flat sequence, notifications sit under date headings so you can scan by when something happened.
Each notification is placed by the calendar day it was received, in your own timezone, under:
- Today - everything that arrived today.
- Yesterday - everything from the previous day.
- Older - everything before that.
These are calendar days rather than rolling windows: a notification from late last night sits under Yesterday even if it is only a couple of hours old. A heading only appears when it has notifications under it, so a quiet day simply is not there.
After a few days away, nothing qualifies for Today or Yesterday, and one undifferentiated Older block would bury your most recent activity. For that case the panel promotes the most recent day to its own heading, dated, such as Mar 14, 2026, and keeps the rest under Older, so the newest activity always stays separated from the backlog.
As you scroll and the panel loads older entries, they join the bottom of the list under Older.
New Notifications While You Are Working
The platform checks for new notifications every 10 seconds while you are signed in, and what you see when something arrives depends on whether the panel is open.
With the panel closed, the bell badge updates and a toast appears in the bottom-right corner for about five seconds. A single new notification shows its type, title, and the start of its message, with a View button that jumps straight to it. A message a flow sent keeps its formatting in the toast, and a long one is cut with a fade, leaving the rest to View; several arriving together collapse into one toast reading You have <N> new notifications, whose View opens the panel instead. Either toast can be dismissed.
With the panel open, there is no toast. A <N> new notifications button appears at the top of the list, and clicking it pulls the new entries in. While they are pending, scrolling stops loading older entries, so pull the new ones in first and infinite scroll resumes.
Empty State
When a tab has nothing to show, the panel displays a icon with You're all caught up, and a line naming the tab you are on (on All, simply No notifications to show). On the Unread tab this is also when the bell loses its badge.
Retention
Marking a notification as read moves it out of the Unread tab and into your history, where it stays available on Read and All. There is no delete action, and no automatic expiry. The one thing a notification does not outlive is its subject: when the asset it points to is deleted, the notifications that reference it go with it.