How to trash or permanently delete a conversation

In your Front inbox, you can trash your conversations and restore them at any time. In addition to trashing a conversation, Front also allows you to permanently delete specific messages or full conversations.

Trash a conversation in your inbox by clicking the trash can icon at the top of the conversation. It will then be moved to the Trash tab of the associated inbox.

Conversations in the Trash tab of your inbox can be restored at any time by clicking Restore at the top of the conversation. After restoring a conversation it will be moved to the Open tab of the inbox.

Front will not automatically permanently delete any of the conversations in your Trash tab. If you would like to permanently delete a message or conversation you can do so manually by following the steps in the Permanently delete messages or conversations section below.

Conversations in the Trash folder are not automatically included when searching your Front inboxes. If you want to search trashed conversations, use the is:trashed filter in your search.

Conversations in the Trash tab are excluded from your analytics metrics. If you restore a trashed conversation it will be included in your analytics once restored.

If you would like to include trashed conversations in your analytics consider archiving the conversations instead of trashing them, as archived conversations are included in analytics.

Shared inboxes

Workspace admins can trash or restore conversations in shared inboxes. If your team is using custom roles, any teammate with a custom role that includes the Conversation - Delete / mark as spam permission can also trash and restore conversations in shared inboxes.

Teammates with the default member role cannot trash or restore conversations in shared inboxes and will see the Trash and Restore options greyed out.

All teammates with access to a shared inbox are able to view the conversations within the Trash tab of the inbox, regardless of role.

Individual inboxes

All users can trash and restore conversations in their own individual inboxes.

We understand you may need to permanently delete some messages or conversations in Front. For example, when an email contains sensitive HR information or credit card details, it's possible that you wouldn't want others to see these emails in Trash or would need to remove them for privacy purposes.

The permanent delete feature allows you to completely delete whole conversations or single messages in Front. This action is permanent and cannot be reversed by you or Front’s Support team. There is no grace period for recovering messages or conversations that you permanently delete.

Using permanent delete will only delete the record from Front’s servers. Any records of the messages that exist in other email clients and servers (like Gmail or Office 365), or on the servers of other channels like Twitter or Twilio will not be deleted when you permanently delete a message in Front.

Step 1

Open the conversation containing the message you’d like to delete. Click the three-dot icon at the top right corner of the individual message you want to delete.

Step 2

Click Delete.

Step 3

A warning will pop up to confirm the permanent deletion. Click Delete to confirm.

There will be no activity line in the conversation to record the change.

Note: If you are deleting the last message of the conversation, you will be prompted in the pop-up to choose whether you want to delete the message or the conversation. If you press Delete message, the conversation will be preserved with the comments and tags but the message will be deleted. If you press Delete conversation, everything will be deleted including comments and tags.

Step 1

Open the conversation you want to delete. Click the trash icon at the top of the message to move the conversation to Trash.

Step 2

Open the Trash tab of your inbox, and select the conversation. If you want to delete a conversation already in Trash, just find it in the list.

Step 3

Click the arrow button, then Delete permanently at the top of the conversation.

Step 4

A warning will pop up to confirm the permanent deletion. Click Delete to confirm.

Shared inboxes

Workspace admins are able to permanently delete messages or conversations in shared inboxes. If your team is using custom roles, any teammate with a custom role that includes the Conversations / Messages - delete permanently permission can also permanently delete messages or conversations in shared inboxes.

Teammates with the default member role cannot permanently delete messages or conversations in shared inboxes.

Individual inboxes

All users can permanently delete private messages or conversations in their own individual inboxes.

The impacts of trashing a conversation vary based on who trashes the conversation, and where they trash it from.

To learn more about what happens when you trash a conversation from various locations, check out this article.

Yes. You can select and trash multiple conversations using mass actions in Front. Check out this article to review mass actions.

Yes. See here for details and limitations.

For accounts on new sync: Both trash and permanent delete actions will not sync. See the Gmail sync or Office 365 sync articles to learn more.

For accounts on legacy sync: There is a two-way sync between Trash in Front and your trash folder in Gmail or Office 365. However, permanently deleting a message or conversation in Front will not sync back to your Gmail or Office 365 inbox outside of Front.

The permanent delete feature will be inactive any of the following occur:

1. You use Select all to highlight all trashed conversations. See here for more details.

2. You do not have permission to permanently delete a conversation you’ve selected.