How the shared team inbox works

A shared mailbox is an email account, like info@ or admin@, that more than one team member can see and reply to. Tidyflow turns a shared mailbox into a team queue and keeps each person’s own Inbox as their personal to-do list, so the whole team can work the same mail without stepping on each other. Your own private accounts are not affected by any of this and keep working exactly as they always have.

Your personal Inbox: the Pinned shelf and the feed

Your Inbox, at the top of the left sidebar, is your triage home. It has two parts:

• A Pinned section at the top holds the threads that are yours: ones assigned to you, ones you have claimed, and ones where a teammate mentioned you in an internal comment. Pinned threads stay put until you archive them, so nothing important sinks out of sight.
• Below the Pinned section is a time-ordered feed of your own mail and the open shared threads you are part of, newest activity first. It also carries your Tidyflow notifications.

Team mail that nobody has picked up does not appear in your personal Inbox, and it does not count towards the Inbox badge in the main navigation. It lives in the team mailbox queue instead, so your Inbox only ever shows work that is already yours. Because of this, get into the habit of checking your team mailboxes, not just your Inbox. New mail there shows as the unpicked count next to the mailbox in the sidebar.

How a thread becomes yours

A shared thread becomes yours, and pins to your Inbox, in one of three ways:

• You are assigned it. When a teammate assigns a thread to you, it pins to your Inbox with a note of who assigned it. Assignment is a state: if the thread is reassigned to someone else, it moves to their Inbox, and if a closed thread you are assigned to gets a new reply, it reopens and comes back to yours.
• You claim it with Assign to me. Open an unassigned thread in a shared mailbox and click Assign to me to take it. That assigns it to you and pins it in your Inbox until you archive it.
• A teammate mentions you. If a teammate @mentions you in an internal comment on a thread, it pins to your Inbox as a heads-up. A mention pin stays until you clear it yourself, even if the team closes the thread, so an FYI is never lost. Once you clear it, it stays cleared.

Work a shared mailbox as a queue

Open a Team mailbox from the sidebar to work it as a shared queue. Each team mailbox in the sidebar shows a count of conversations nobody has picked up yet.

The queue has three views:

• Open shows live conversations, with unassigned mail grouped at the top under an Unassigned heading so the team can see at a glance what still needs an owner.
• Snoozed shows threads you have snoozed on this mailbox, in the order they will wake.
• Closed shows conversations the team has finished.

Click Assign to me on any open thread to claim it. It stays in the mailbox queue for the team to see and also pins in your own Inbox until you are done with it.

Archive, Close, and Snooze

Tidyflow uses two different actions on shared mail, and the wording is deliberate:

• Archive is personal. It clears the thread from your Inbox while your teammates keep theirs. There is one exception: if the thread is assigned to you, archiving it also closes it for the team, since finishing your assigned work finishes the conversation.
• Close is team-wide. It wraps the conversation up for everyone and archives it at your email provider. If the client replies, the thread reopens automatically and returns to the assignee’s Inbox.
• Snooze hides a thread until a time you choose. When it wakes, it returns to your feed as a fresh arrival.

On a private account, Archive still archives the message at your provider as it always did. The personal-versus-team distinction only applies to shared mailboxes.

Reading a shared thread does not mark it read in Gmail or Outlook

Reading a thread in a shared mailbox marks it read for you only. It stays unread in Gmail or Outlook, and for your teammates, until someone Closes it for the team. This is intentional: it means two people cannot accidentally hide a thread from each other just by opening it, and the mailbox in Gmail or Outlook keeps showing what the team has not yet finished.

Each team member has their own read state, so an unread count you see reflects what you personally have not opened. Your private accounts are unaffected and still sync read state to your provider as soon as you read a message.