I've been having an off and on problem with the Windows 10 notification icon not showing new email notifications from the built-in Mail application. Sometime the notifications just stop occurring and then they mysteriously start showing again and I'm wondering if anyone has seen this same behavior and figured out what the cause is. Here's what I've done or checked out so far:
I have run SFC and DISM and neither showed a problem with the OS or OS files.
I read that if there was a problem with the mail app that you should reset the app which I did. I then double checked the mail app and verified that notifications were set to the ON position. After everything was reset and I restarted my system I saw no change in the notifications for mail.
Someone suggested that for mail notifications to be displayed that the mail app needed to run in the background to send notifications and to remain up to date so I drilled down into Settings/Privacy/Background Apps and found that mail was listed as an app that runs in the background and the switch to turn the app on and off was properly set to the ON position.
Someone else suggested that to get notifications an app also had to be listed in Settings/System/Notifications & Actions. I checked this list and currently Mail is not on that list however I don't know if this is normal behavior for that app not to appear or not and I did not see a method of adding mail to the list.
I want to mention something else just to make sure that whomever reading this has a complete picture of my situation. In reality I don't use the Mail app that's available in Windows 10 to read and write email messages. Instead I use the Outlook 2010 email app as my email client as I have a number of setting that the Mail client simply cannot be configured for. I have the Mail client in Windows 10 setup specifically so that I get notifications of emails being available on the email server that I use as I don't have Outlook 2010 open all the time. Having the Mail application watching for new mail being added to my inbox allows me to quickly view the subject header and the sender to determine if there is anything important that I need to read immediately. Now I'm assuming that running these two applications on the same PC is not an issue but I wanted that fact to be known.
My gut feeling is that there is something somewhere in the system, perhaps a registry key or value that keeps getting flipped from an on position to off and then perhaps some patch from Microsoft turns that value back on for a while until some event turns it back off again. Bottom line is that this behavior is very frustrating as it's inconsistent.
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
