Every message from your contact form, ticket center, widget and forwarded email lands in one place: the Messages page of your dashboard. This guide walks through the shared inbox from the conversation list to the reply box, so your team can assign, answer and close conversations without stepping on each other.
Teammates need the Messages permission to open this page. Owners always have it. See Inviting Teammates and Managing Roles.
The conversation list
The left column lists conversations, newest activity first, with resolved conversations pushed below active ones. Each row shows the contact, the subject or last message preview, the channel it came from and a status badge. Rows with unread messages are highlighted and marked with a dot until someone on your team opens them.
Use the Search conversations box to find a conversation by contact name, email, subject or message text. Click Filters to narrow the list by status:
| Filter | What it shows |
|---|---|
| All | Every conversation except promotional ones |
| Pending | New conversations nobody on your team has replied to yet |
| Open | Conversations your team has replied to that are not resolved yet, including resolved ones the visitor reopened |
| Resolved | Closed conversations, including archived ones |
| Stale | Conversations with no activity for the stale period set in Settings > Messages (14 days by default) |
| Promotional | Newsletters and automated mail that were filed away from the main inbox |
Promotional conversations stay out of All on purpose. See Contacts, Blocking and Promotional Email Cleanup for how that filter works.
Unread state
Opening a conversation marks it as read for the whole team. If you want to come back to it later, open the More actions menu (the three dots at the top of the thread) and choose Mark as unread. The same menu has Mark as read for conversations you have skimmed in the list.
Assign a conversation to a teammate
At the top of the thread, click Assign to (or the current assignee's name) and pick a teammate. The assignee's avatar appears on the conversation row so everyone can see who owns it. Pick Unassigned to release it. Assignment is a signal for your team, it does not restrict who can reply.
Reply to a visitor
The reply box sits at the bottom of the thread with two tabs: Reply and Note. On the Reply tab, write your answer and click Send, or press Ctrl+Enter. The editor supports bold, italics, lists and links, and you can paste text from anywhere.
Two toggles control how the visitor is notified:
- Email visitor sends an email copy of your reply. Turn it off when you know the visitor is watching the widget or ticket center and does not need email.
- Send instantly skips the 60 second delay. By default, Helpdesky waits a minute and drops the email if the visitor reads your reply in the meantime. The full logic is in Email Notification Timing.
Sent a typo? Hover your own message, open its menu and choose Edit or Delete. Edited messages show an (edited) marker to the visitor.
Private notes
Switch to the Note tab, write your comment and click Add note. Notes are shown on an amber background with a Private note label. The visitor never sees them and no email is sent. Use notes to hand context to the teammate you just assigned, or to record what you checked before replying.
CC and extra recipients on email conversations
For conversations that arrived by email, the reply box shows the To and Cc fields prefilled from the last email the visitor sent. Edit them before sending to loop in a colleague on the customer's side or drop someone from the thread. You can address up to 50 people per reply. Cc only applies to email conversations; widget and ticket center replies always go to the visitor alone.
Every sent email keeps a record of who received it. Click Show details under a message to see the To, Cc and Reply-to addresses that were used.
Ticket center visitors can also add up to five notification emails when they open a ticket, for example a manager who should be copied. Those addresses receive your replies instead of the visitor's own address and are listed under Notification Emails in the contact panel, where you can remove any of them.
Attachments
Click the paperclip icon in the reply box to attach files. Each file can be up to 25 MB. Images (JPG, PNG, GIF, WEBP), PDFs, Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, text, CSV, ZIP, JSON, XML, video and audio files are accepted. Images are shown inline in the thread and other files appear as downloadable cards. Visitors can send attachments to you the same way from every channel.
Resolve, reopen and delete
When the question is answered, click Resolve at the top of the thread. The conversation moves to the Resolved filter and shows Resolved by with your name. If the visitor writes again, it reopens on its own and returns to Open, marked unread. You can also click Reopen yourself.
Need to close a backlog? The inbox header has Close all tickets, which resolves every conversation that is not already resolved in the current help center. Individual conversations still reopen when a customer replies.
Delete conversation in the More actions menu permanently removes the conversation and all its messages. There is no undo, so prefer Resolve for anything you might need again.
Fix a visitor's email address
Visitors sometimes mistype their address in the widget. In the contact panel on the right, hover the email under Main Information and click the pencil to edit it. If the new address already belongs to another contact, Helpdesky offers to move the conversation to that contact instead so their history stays in one place.
Delivery and read status
Under your own messages you will see when the visitor opened them: Seen at a time, plus where it was read (widget, ticket center, the emailed conversation page, or the email itself). Email opens carry a small caveat because some mail clients prefetch images before the person actually reads the message, which can register an open early.
The contact panel
Click Contact info to open the right hand panel. It groups everything you know about the person:
- Main Information with name, email, channel and the page they wrote from
- Visitor Device with the IP address the visitor wrote from, when available
- Custom Fields submitted through the contact form or ticket center
- Notification Emails for ticket center conversations
- Conversation Routing showing the assignee and who resolved it
- Conversations listing every other thread from this contact
- Block contact at the bottom, covered in Contacts, Blocking and Promotional Email Cleanup
Working across several help centers
If your account has access to more than one help center, a switcher at the top of the inbox lets you pick All Accounts or a single one. In the combined view each row shows which help center the conversation belongs to, and you reply from whichever one it came from. See Running Several Help Centers on One Account.
Automatic tidying
Two settings under Settings > Messages keep the list manageable:
- Mark tickets as stale flags pending and open conversations with no activity for a set number of days (14 by default). They show a Stale badge and appear under the Stale filter until someone replies or resolves them.
- Auto resolve tickets is off by default. When you turn it on, Helpdesky waits the configured number of days (30 by default) from that moment before it closes anything, then resolves inactive conversations on an hourly schedule.
Resolved conversations older than 30 days are moved to an archive every night. They still appear under All and Resolved, still show up in search and can be opened, so nothing is lost.
Replying faster
Two tools in the reply box save time on repeat questions: Ask AI searches your knowledge base and drafts an answer you can paste, and Insert Article drops a link to a published guide. Both are covered in Translating Conversations and Replying with AI.
Open Messages, pick the oldest Pending conversation and work your way down. Once the habit is set, the filters and assignments above keep the inbox at zero.