Ever since I upgraded to Mountain Lion on the Mac, I get distracted by little balloons that appear on the screen when I get new e-mail messages. I looked in the Mail preferences and didn’t see a way to turn these off. Is this an irreversible feature?
Those little alert balloons are part of the Notifications feature of OS X 10.8, the system otherwise known as Mountain Lion. You can change their appearance or turn them off entirely, but to do so, you need to visit the preferences for Notifications.
To get there, click the System Preferences icon in the Dock or go to the Apple Menu in the top left corner of the screen and choose System Preferences. In the System Preferences box, click the Notifications icon in the top row.
In the list of programs on the left side of the box, select Mail. On the right side of the box under “Mail alert style,” click the None icon. Other controls in the Notification box allow you to adjust other audio and visual alerts for incoming messages.
Alerts for other programs on the Mac — including Calendar, Twitter, and the FaceTime video-chat service — can be adjusted in the Notifications Preferences box. You can also rearrange the vertical order in which messages from programs appear in the OS X Notification Center list; you can see your Notification Center messages by clicking the icon on the top right corner of the Mac’s toolbar.