ClickUp Inbox: Notifications, Tabs, and What to Clear

ClickUp Inbox is your notification list for one Workspace. It is not a shared team mailbox. Open it from the Home Sidebar. The badge next to Inbox is the number of unread notifications in the Primary tab, not the count of everything ClickUp could tell you.

Help says the Inbox is on all plans, and that everyone, including guests, can use it. Guests do not see the names of every person in the Workspace, because they do not have full access. The Inbox keeps 3 months of uncleared notifications and 1 month of cleared notifications. If the list feels endless, the fix is the tabs and the notification presets, not a second chat app. Chat itself is a different surface, covered in ClickUp Chat. The product map is the ClickUp hub.

What are the ClickUp Inbox tabs?

The Inbox has four tabs: Primary, Other, Later, and Cleared. A fifth tab, for all notifications, can be turned on from Customize in the upper-right. Each tab shows a count under its name, except Cleared. Inside a tab, the newest notifications are first, and unread ones are bold.

You can choose which types of notifications land on Primary from Customize. Some activities always go to Primary. If any notification in a group counts as important, the whole group stays on Primary, even after you have read it. Help's example: an overdue task you follow sits on Other until someone assigns you a comment on it. Both notifications then group together on Primary.

Other is the follower firehose. If you follow every task in a busy List, Other is where status edits collect. Unfollow the tasks you do not need, or clear that tab on a schedule. Following is a choice. The shortcut to follow or unfollow from a notification is W.

Later is the holding pen. You can open, clear, snooze, or mark read from that tab. Cleared is not a trash can with no return. Hover a cleared item and click Unclear, or press E. It goes back to the tab it came from, in its original order. Cmd or Ctrl+Z undoes the last action. After 30 days, Help says those cleared notifications are permanently removed. That matches the "1 month of cleared notifications" line at the top of the Inbox article.

Notifications from the same task, Doc, or List group into one row. If Group by date is on, those rows sit under Today, Yesterday, Last week, and Older. Snoozed items group by when they return: Today, Tomorrow, Next week, and Later.

How do you work through the Inbox?

Click a group to open it. The left side shows the notification and the latest activity. A thread reply can expand to the earlier replies. The right side is the task, Doc, or thread, so you can answer without hunting for the source. Reminder notifications that did not start from a comment or a Chat message open in fullscreen instead.

From the list, hover a row:

Right-click for the same actions plus Favorite, Add to (Personal List or Priorities, depending on the item), Open, Open in new tab, and Copy link. The Favorite and Add to menus change with the type of notification. Clear all, in the upper-right of the current tab, clears that tab. If a filter is on, only rows that match the filter are cleared.

Filters sit in the upper-left and they stick after you leave and come back:

A workable morning pass is short. Open Primary. Filter to Assigned if the list is mixed. Deal with comments assigned to you, which are also listed in assigned comments. Snooze anything that is real but not today. Clear the rest. Do not start the day on Other. That tab is status noise unless you are auditing a project.

Help also lists two Brain actions from the Inbox: summarizing comment threads, and creating tasks from comments or threads, manually or with Brain. Confirm Brain is available in your Workspace before you depend on it. In our pricing data, checked October 2026, ClickUp AI is a separate add-on from $9 per user per month.

Which notification settings should you use?

Notification settings are separate from the Inbox tabs. They decide which events are allowed to arrive, and on which device. Help says notifications are on all plans, that each person sets their own preferences, and that the settings are per Workspace. They cannot be opened from the mobile app. Change them in the browser or the desktop app, then the phone follows.

Open them from your avatar (Notifications) or from the Inbox: Customize, then Notification settings.

Default is ClickUp's recommended set. On Inbox it includes assigned comments, new comments, mentions, status changes, tasks assigned to you, due date changes, and a long list of other task, Doc, Chat, and sharing events. Several of those, including comments assigned to you and tasks assigned to you, are marked as cannot be deactivated.

Focused is the smaller set. On Inbox it still includes assigned comments, comments you are mentioned in, new comments, status changes, and tasks assigned to you, and Help marks those as cannot be deactivated. It drops a lot of the Default noise, such as the broader due-date and ClickApp triggers Default turns on for Inbox. Use Focused if Primary is full of edits you did not ask for. Use Custom only after Focused is still too loud or too quiet, because Custom is easy to break in a way you notice three days later.

Mentions only exists for email, browser, desktop, and mobile. Help says it is not available for Inbox. You cannot shrink the in-app Inbox to mentions alone with that preset. You can still filter the Inbox to Mentions with Shift + 1.

Smart Notifications, when the toggle is on, stops mobile alerts while you are active in ClickUp on the browser or the desktop app. Leave it on unless you have a reason to be pinged twice. Test buttons on the settings page can send a test email, show a browser or desktop example, and show a mobile example. Browser popups also need the browser's permission for ClickUp. The mobile app guide covers what the phone can do after that permission is set.

You can mute notifications for a while by updating your status, or from Mute Notifications in Account Settings. That is the right switch on a focus day. It is the wrong switch to leave on for a week and then blame the tool for a missed assignment.

How should a team use Inbox without another status meeting?

Inbox replaces the "any updates?" meeting only if people trust it. Agree on three rules:

1. Assign a comment when you need a reply or a change. An unassigned comment is easy to treat as chatter. Assigned comments land on Primary.
2. Each person clears Primary daily and leaves Other for a set time, or unfollows tasks they do not own.
3. Status for the group lives on a List or a dashboard, not in everyone's Inbox. How to reduce meetings is the habit. Inbox is the personal side of it.

Guests can use Inbox for the work shared with them. Do not expect a guest to see every name, and do not expect their notification settings to match a member's. Say, in the project Doc, which comments will be assigned and which channel is for emergencies. Chat is for the conversation. Inbox is for the items that need a person.

If Primary is still unusable after Focused, the Workspace is over-notifying because too many people follow too many tasks. Remove followers on old Lists before you add another tool.