Alerts in Answers (instead of email)

I've been thinking about this for a while, and the post about the Ask An Expert feature triggered me posting this.

Whenever I ask, comment, answer or otherwise follow a post, information about updates on that post is sent to me by email. This implementation has some serious drawbacks:

• Tons of email spam. I've set up a custom folder for UA questions, but for a user that hasn't done that yet, replying to a question and getting thirteen emails the next day could turn them off from answering any more questions

• I really don't want to use the Ask an Expert feature, as I know that it'll send stuff to other people's email inbox. There's enough spam in the world as is.

• I'd really like to get a notification whenever there's a post in a topic that I'm interested in. I tried that for a while, but the amount of email filtering simply became too much to filter through.

• Since the site doesn't keep track of when you visit, if there has been 5 answers/comments on an answer since the last time you checked the site, you get 5 new emails. Answering 3 questions one day can easily lead to having to manage 20ish emails the next day.

Compared to this, the alerts in the forums are a ton better. You only get one alert per thread you're following, and all the notifications are inside of the community, instead of through the email inbox.

Could you consider moving the notifications to internally in Unity Answers? That'd be much more manageable for us, and I for one would be much more likely to follow topics, which would probably lead me to be able to answer more questions.