Tips for Tuesday: Getting rid of notification icons when you have no unread messages

It just didn’t make sense. After years of working with and writing about the BlackBerry, you’d think I could do something as simple as make an email notification go away. But no matter what method I tried, and how empty my inbox appeared, I still had new message notifications while no new messages appeared in my inbox. I went to all of my inboxes and hit U, which brings up the next unread message, but all I got was a notification that I had no unread messages. It wasn’t until I vented in frustration that someone finally shed some light on the problem. Sure enough, his method worked like a charm. Seriously, this problem killed me for a while. It’s quite frustrating to have this fancy new notifications bar in OS 6 and have it malfunction. If there is a new message indicator in that bar, shouldn’t the messages in question appear when I click the bar? Normally they do, but for some reason I just couldn’t shake these dozen or so unaccounted-for messages. The fix was so easy that I bopped my head, but hey, better a bopped head and no new notifications than those phantom notifications. To find out where those pesky messages are hiding, go to the Messages app and then click menu. Select Search By, and then select Advanced (or just Advanced Search, on older OS versions). Once you’re in the search screen, scroll down to the Show field. Next to Show you’ll see a drop down box that has Sent and Received as the default. Click on that and select Unopened Only. Scroll down further and click Search to see your results. Sure enough, you’ll see a bunch of messages there that you didn’t even realize were on your device. You can go through and open them up, which will then remove them from your notifications list. While the reasons for these notifications will vary from person to person, I found that mine were all in from Gmail messages that I had archived and labeled, but hadn’t marked as read. I have since changed my Gmail filter, as to prevent this from happening in the future.

About the Author

Joe Pawlikowski is the Senior Editor at MobileMoo.com and has been covering the mobile industry full time since 2007. When he's not writing about the tech scene, he can be found discussing his personal love - baseball (and more specifically the New York Yankees) as well as writing on his personal blog.