You are only notified once, either via email or via the icon.

Oh, so if I disable email, then the icon will work? I'll give that a shot

In email settings you can set each one to 'Email, Notify, Ignore'. I find it useful to set low-quality items to Notify.

Or go full email-less.

Ok yeah, this does seem to be working.
If I might offer a suggestion, it would be cool if this worked similar to how slack works in that if a notification is not marked unread after configurable time then it still sends you an email. That way you won't be bombarded with email if Phab is open, but if you're away from your desk you'll get emails to let you know that something is happening.

Also, most services separate emails from their in-app notifications in that you'll still see a notification icon even if you got an email about it.

It's sort of counter to the very design philosophy of Phabricator, so we're unlikely to pursue it. Mostly, Phabricator, like most "enterprise" applications are productivity tools. We're very critical of adding features such as that as they have a high level of noise, with a very low level of signal. I can understand why other applications, like Facebook/Twitter, etc do this, as they are incentivized to keep you on their service. With Phabricator I just want you to go back to work.

See also T7004.

T5791 T6824 T6309 also, haha, there are a number of requests in this vein, but T5791 seems to be King right now.

Haha ok, I'll put my thoughts on one of those so you can have one less task to worry about.