Understanding inbox and channel settings

Your inboxes and channels have many settings and features that allow you to customize your workflows and preferences. To edit them, click the gear icon on the top right of Front and into the Company or Personal settings tab, then select Inboxes or Channels to pull up a list of your shared or individual inboxes and channels. Select an inbox or channel to edit its settings, provision teammate access, and more.

To understand more about how inboxes and channels work in Front, check out this article. To learn how to add a new inbox, check out these articles on creating a shared inbox or individual inbox.

Rule list

If your team has any active rules related to this inbox, they will be listed here. Click on a rule to view its full details or edit the rule. You can view your rule list by action.

To learn more about rules in Front, and which rules are included in your plan, check out our Understanding rules article. 

Traffic chart

The Traffic chart gives you a visual overview of how messages move into and out of this inbox. It shows the channels that flow into the inbox, any rules that move messages into this inbox, as well as any rules that move messages out of this inbox and into another inbox.

You can click on any object that appears in the Traffic chart to jump to the settings for that channel/inbox/rule.

In this section you can choose to make the inbox public to everyone in the workspace, or you can select which teammates have access. If you restrict access, you can use the dropdown menu to select which teammates have access to this inbox.

Front offers a variety of inbox-level settings that allow you to customize different workflows for different inboxes.

Inbox name

The internal name for this inbox.

Description

An internal description of this inbox (optional).

Color

Choose a color to help you quickly visually reference this inbox. Your inbox’s color will appear to the left of the inbox's name in your sidebar and at the top of any conversation in that inbox.

You'll also see this inbox's color represented in the conversation list when working outside of the inbox itself (such as in your Assigned to me or Shared with me folders, or when viewing all conversations within a tag). Quickly identify a conversation's inbox by looking at the colored indicator at the top right corner of the conversation preview.

Show this inbox in sidebars of

Shared inboxes only: Select teammates to pin this inbox to their sidebars.

Make inbox visible in analytics

Individual inboxes only: By default, the analytics of an individual inbox will not be included in Analytics reports, but this can be enabled by toggling on the Make inbox visible in the analytics setting.

Learn more about this feature here.

Company rules affect this inbox

Toggle on or off to allow company rules to apply to this inbox.

Unassign conversation if inactive for

Shared inboxes only: Set an inactivity period to automatically unassign conversations when they receive a new message in this inbox. Select from various default values or enter a custom inactivity period (no minimum or maximum value). You can select Never if you do not want to automatically unassign conversations after an inactivity period.

To learn how bump settings affect unassign behavior, click here.

Close conversation segment if inactive for

Set an inactivity period for conversations in this inbox. Select from various default values or enter a custom inactivity period between 10 minutes to 31 days.

The inactivity period represents the length of time during which a conversation segment should have no new activity before being closed (marked inactive). Once a conversation segment is closed, any analytics data or metrics related to the segment will lock and cannot be changed (e.g. segment end date, total reply time, etc.). If a new activity occurs in the conversation, a new segment will be created. Learn more about inactivity time here.

Automatically trash inactive conversations after

Shared inboxes only: Set a data retention policy for this inbox. See this article to learn more.

Keep actions in this inbox separate from other inboxes

Shared inboxes only: When you have shared inboxes added to Front within the same workspace, the default behavior is that emails addressed to multiple shared inbox addresses will be automatically merged into one master copy. Toggle on Keep actions in this inbox separate from other inboxes to disable this behavior.

This feature is disabled by default. Read more about the feature here to learn how enabling it will affect your shared inbox.

Convert to shared or individual inbox

Convert a shared inbox to an individual inbox or vice versa. See this article to learn more.

Archive all conversations

Mass archive all conversations in this inbox from before a specified date. Read more here.

Manage custom inbox information for your inbox. To learn more about using custom inbox fields, read more here.

Use this section to set up inbox-level business hours to use with analytics and rules. See here for more details and full instructions.

This feature is available on the Scale plan or above. Some legacy plans may also have this feature.

Default inbox

Select the default inbox messages will be routed into.

Front allows you to move a channel from one individual inbox to another individual inbox, or from one shared inbox to another shared inbox. Moving the channel to another inbox will bring along all the conversation history that is attached to that channel. See here for more details and full instructions.

Routing rules

Click Create routing rules to help you automate processes messages for your channel. To learn more about rules in Front, and which rules are included in your plan, check out our Understanding rules article. 

Front offers a variety of channel-level settings that allow you to customize different workflows for different channels.

Channel settings vary depending on the type of channel, e.g. you’ll see different settings available for an email channel than you’d see for a website chat channel. Below are channel settings that are available for every channel type.

Undo send timing

Establish an undo send period for messages sent from this channel, or choose to have this channel’s messages send immediately. Check out this article for more information.

All teammates can reply

Toggle on All teammates can reply to allow all teammates to reply using this channel, without needing access to its inbox. Check out this article for more information.

Auto-assign conversations on first reply

Toggle on Auto-assign conversations on first reply to automatically assign a conversation to the first teammate who replies to it. Check out this article for more information.

Deleting an inbox will delete both your inbox and any conversation within it. When you delete an inbox, all the history within the inbox will be deleted and cannot be restored. Check out this article for more information on deleting an inbox.

Click Delete channel at the top of a channel's settings to remove it. Removing a channel from an inbox breaks the connection between the channel and its inbox, but does not delete message history. See here for more details and full instructions.

An inbox in Front does not need to contain any channels. An inbox without channels is referred to as an empty inbox, and can be used for organizational purposes. For more information about empty inboxes, check out this article.