Codex app automation notifications remain unread after being viewed

What issue are you seeing?

Automation notifications / automation-generated threads remain marked as unread even after the user has opened and read them in the Codex desktop app.

The user sees a persistent unread badge/count for automation results. In this case the app UI showed an automation notification count, and local state later showed 34 unread thread IDs. Opening/reviewing the corresponding automation results did not clear the count.

There does not appear to be an obvious UI affordance to acknowledge these notifications, such as:

• Mark as read
• Mark all as read
• Dismiss / acknowledge automation notification
• Clear automation inbox notifications

What steps can reproduce the bug?

1. Create or use active Codex automations that produce visible findings/messages.
2. Wait for automation runs to complete and appear as notifications / inbox items / generated threads.
3. Open and read the automation result threads in the Codex desktop app.
4. Return to the automation/inbox/sidebar notification surface.
5. Observe that the unread badge/count remains present even though the user has already viewed the notifications.

What is the expected behavior?

After a user opens/views an automation notification or the thread generated by an automation, Codex should mark it as read and decrement/remove the unread count.

At minimum, the UI should expose an explicit action such as "Mark as read", "Mark all as read", or "Acknowledge" for automation notifications.

A user should not need to edit local app state files to clear already-viewed automation notifications.

What actually happens?

The unread count persists after the notifications have been viewed.

The only workaround I found was to manually edit the local app state and clear:

~/.codex/.codex-global-state.json
"electron-persisted-atom-state"."unread-thread-ids-by-host-v1".local

In this case, clearing that array in both .codex-global-state.json and .codex-global-state.json.bak removed the local unread count after a relaunch/refresh, but this is not an acceptable UX or durable product behavior.

Additional information

Codex App version: 26.609.30741 (3808)
Bundle identifier: com.openai.codex
Platform: macOS 26.5.1 (25F80), arm64

The automations themselves were still active and working. The issue is specifically notification/read-state handling for automation-generated results.

I also adjusted the automation prompts to return DONT_NOTIFY when there is nothing actionable, which should reduce future noise, but it does not solve the underlying product issue: viewed automation notifications should be acknowledged automatically or manually from the UI.