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Incoming - Outgoing Emails differentiation

  • October 31, 2024
  • 7 replies
  • 237 views
romainberard

It is not easy to see the difference between an incoming email and an outgoing one.

Is there a way to make it more obvious ? Maybe using colours ?

Best answer by Luke

I see 🤔 The tagging option is a good workaround, but if it’s still not allowing you to see it clearly then there may be another way. For example, setting up Views based on your “IN” and “OUT” tags could help, or potentially changing your channel’s Threading mode.

 

It depends on your desired workflow I guess; are you looking to fully separate out your inbound and outbound messages (like Gmail’s “message view” vs. “conversation view”), or is it more about seeing which direction the latest message in a conversation is? 

______________

Thank you for also sharing your feedback on the read/unread status of conversations in Front! Unfortunately, it's not currently possible to sort your inbox by "unread" or filter out only unread messages.

For full transparency, this has been brought up previously by other customers, and our Product Team have evaluated the potential benefits and shortcomings of such a feature. The result of this analysis was that they decided not to move forward with building it.  

 

Archiving instead of relying on read / unread statuses is the Front-recommended way to manage your inbox. 

 

The action-oriented nature of the open / archive way of working is designed to help better leverage routing, assignment and archiving workflows.

As you’ve mentioned, if you would still prefer to use the “read” status of conversations, you can use the "is:unread" filter in the top-level Search bar in Front. To improve the results you could also combine the filter with the “is:open” to avoid archived or unsubscribed conversations from showing up in the results. 

7 replies

Luke
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  • Luke
  • Fronteer
  • November 4, 2024

Hi Romain, 

 

Luke from the Front Support team here 👋 Thank you for posting this question! 

 

There isn’t currently a way to customise the colours of inbound and outbound messages, I’m afraid, but this would be a great addition to our Ideas portal! 💡

 

I did find this existing idea on the portal: https://front.ideas.aha.io/ideas/PRD-I-4230 
It’s similar to what you’ve described but is specific to “Chat” channels. 

 

I hope this helps! If there’s anything else I can assist with, please let me know!

Luke

romainberard
  • romainberard
  • Author
  • Conversationalist
  • November 4, 2024

Thank you for your reply.

The way I am dealing with it is putting a TAG for IN and a tag for OUT, so that I can see the difference easily. But other system allow you to chose either TO or FROM in the display settings (or both) so that it is clear….

Another frustrating point is not being able to easily filter emails with read/unread. I am using the code is:unread but it does not work well and keeps putting me back emails I have read….

Luke
Forum|alt.badge.img+5
  • Luke
  • Fronteer
  • Answer
  • November 4, 2024

I see 🤔 The tagging option is a good workaround, but if it’s still not allowing you to see it clearly then there may be another way. For example, setting up Views based on your “IN” and “OUT” tags could help, or potentially changing your channel’s Threading mode.

 

It depends on your desired workflow I guess; are you looking to fully separate out your inbound and outbound messages (like Gmail’s “message view” vs. “conversation view”), or is it more about seeing which direction the latest message in a conversation is? 

______________

Thank you for also sharing your feedback on the read/unread status of conversations in Front! Unfortunately, it's not currently possible to sort your inbox by "unread" or filter out only unread messages.

For full transparency, this has been brought up previously by other customers, and our Product Team have evaluated the potential benefits and shortcomings of such a feature. The result of this analysis was that they decided not to move forward with building it.  

 

Archiving instead of relying on read / unread statuses is the Front-recommended way to manage your inbox. 

 

The action-oriented nature of the open / archive way of working is designed to help better leverage routing, assignment and archiving workflows.

As you’ve mentioned, if you would still prefer to use the “read” status of conversations, you can use the "is:unread" filter in the top-level Search bar in Front. To improve the results you could also combine the filter with the “is:open” to avoid archived or unsubscribed conversations from showing up in the results. 

romainberard
  • romainberard
  • Author
  • Conversationalist
  • November 4, 2024

Thank you

I would just like to see the msgs as they are today but something to easily show me the difference between incoming and outgoing...like a colour. Today if I send a message to a client X and the same client replies and the message are next to each other, I do not know which one is the incoming from the outgoing.

Luke
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  • Luke
  • Fronteer
  • November 4, 2024

I understand, thank you for the additional information. In that case, I would indeed recommend logging a feature request in our Ideas portal. 

I do also believe that adopting an archiving flow, for when you’ve sent an outbound message for example, would be beneficial. 
Unless you need to retain open visibility on the outbound messages you’ve sent, then archiving them will help to better indicate which messages are inbound. In other words: 

  • Outbound = archived (Using the “Send & archive” option)
  • Inbound = open

 

If you do prefer to keep your outbound messages open, then using your tagging workaround, combined with a View for your “IN” and a separate one for your “OUT” tags will hopefully help render the visibility clearer for you 😊

 

Hope this helps!

romainberard
  • romainberard
  • Author
  • Conversationalist
  • November 4, 2024

Noted.

We do not think the archiving helps as we all -in our team- want to read all incoming/outgoing in the same place. We want to limit moving out of the queue.

    Luke
    Forum|alt.badge.img+5
    • Luke
    • Fronteer
    • November 5, 2024

    That’s completely fair, Romain. Please let me know if you have any additional questions 🙏

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