Add option to receive notifications *only* by email

[mmaster]

Title
Add option to receive notifications *only* by email

Short, concise description of the idea
Rather than always having to have inbox messages, I would like the option to receive only email messages for notification types.

Full description of the idea
(This might be a dupe, but I went back a bit and didn't spot it.)

I don't really use the LJ inbox. I'm not saying it's not a useful feature, just not one that I, personally make much use of. My journal style does not display the inbox count, so I pretty much only see the unread message number on other people's comment pages.

I do, however, make use of notifications. Birthdays, comment threads, and the like. They all go to my email, which is where I read them. But since there's no way to only send the notification to email (that I've found), the messages also get sent to my LJ inbox, and lay there until such time as I realise they're there and manually go in to mark them as 'read'. (I'm one of those people that doesn't like to see an 'unread' counter.)

It would be nice to have the option to be notified by mechanisms other than inbox without the inbox being required. The implementation of this could be as simple as not disabling all the other checkboxes when "inbox" is unchecked.

(I've been talking about this in the context of email, but presumably the same would apply to the other notification mechanisms as well - unticking the "inbox" checkmark would not disable the "TxtLJ" checkmark, for example.)
An ordered list of benefits

• Unread counters annoy me. I wouldn't have to be annoyed any more.
• Less unused database dross knocking about (though it probably doesn't take up that much space).

An ordered list of problems/issues involved

• May confuse users who are then unsure what they're subscribed to, since (depending on mechanism of implementation) they may be working without the visual feedback that implies "This is no longer active".
• The standard "time to code" comment.