I like getting in-app notifications for changes to pages I'm watching, but I despise getting email, and am shocked there's no way to turn that off.  In the meantime, I've adapted by not watching pages anymore, which is a shame.  Now I have no sense of what's happening.

Agree, we need to choose whar form of/channel for notification for what event freely in order to meet individual demamds and preferences.

Another +1.

The current functionality with "Email settings" affecting visibility of notifications in the Workbox is really confusing. Our users expect to receive Workbox-notifications for comments on blog posts they write, without also having to receive e-mail notifications.

There should simply be a "Notifications settings", where the visibility of each type of notification could be set individually for each available notification channel. If some type of notification isn't relevant for the channel, the option could simply be disabled.

Please, Atlassian. Anything coming on this? Users are adept enough and used to Facebook enough that this is actually easier than email notifications. Please make this possible for us.

It would also be really helpful if the workbox also saved a trail of what we shared with others. Currently, unless we share it with ourselves also, there is no record of what we have shared which is never good in a work situation.

+1 say we at Kiva

I think this would be very helpful!
In our company, we are legally obligated to use two completely separated networks, with the one hosting confluence having no internet connection at all. The problem now is that therefore I cannot use email notifications (no internal mail service) but we would like to only use in-app workbox notifications. Unfortunately it seems like i have to configure a smtp server for the notifications to work at all (from jira). Maybe this would be another use case to consider.

Hopefully this isn't overloading this New Feature, but I think what I'm about to suggest is going on the right issue

Personally my (and I'm sure everyone elses) holy grail is to have no email notifications, from either JIRA or Confluence and to instead use only the WorkBox. The Workbox is 90% of the way there in my opinion, and as per what Google+ has done as in the following screenshot, were the 'mark all as read' or the ability to have notifications 'marked as read' only after they were clicked on, would bring it to 100% in my opinion.

My usual mode of interaction with web pages, and thus Confluence/JIRA notifications, is to middle mouse click on them to open them in new tabs, and then as a way of consuming them, just closing the tabs when I have done what needed to be done on each tab, which in this case corresponds 1:1 to a notification.

Obviously it follows that a "Open all unread notifications in tabs" feature would be badassery as well.

This is a must have We should fight the email-spamming problem as much as we can!
I'll vote for it!