It is very important to be able to watch spaces and pages so that when I go to the Notifications bell in Confluence cloud, I can see activity from my watches. I watch a lot of spaces in Confluence and do NOT want to get emails for all of the activity happening in these spaces. I help employees at our company understand how to best set up and use tools in our digital workplace. One of the goals is to reduce email and just work in the tools themselves. It looks like I will need to tell them to set up an email filter that moves all Confluence notifications into an archive folder if they, like me, do not choose to get email notifications out of tools like Confluence but still want to track on certain pages/spaces in the notifications watch this. This is an unnecessary workaround. 

I wonder if my advice will now be to install the mobile app and click on the Activity stream in order to see what is happening in Confluence? Is this the only way to see new activity if I am NOT watching a space or page?  

+1
I, too, would like to reduce my inbox load.  Ideal options would be:

• "Watch" status indicates what actions produce notifications.
• Workbox notifications can be "on" or "off".
• Email notifications can be "on", "off", "daily aggregate" or "weekly aggregate".  Right now the daily digest is in addition to the onslaught of individual notifications, and really has no point.
• Additional granularity would be allowing above Workbox/Email options to apply to each of the following individually:
  • Watched actions
  • My actions
  • Network actions
  • New followers
  • Recommended updates

Important feature also in our company. Goal should be to reduce email load, and intead, using workbox notifications. To do so, we need two things

• Turn off email notifactions completely and use workbox in-app notifications only
• Opportunity to turn on "Page Edit" notifications in workbox
• Ability to mark workbox in-app notifications as read and unread again

Best would be to have settings like this, where I can set my individual notifications for Shares, Mentions, ... and Pages Edits, for both email and workbox.

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!