Shared inbox moves cause unassignment

Hi there! Cat here from the Front support team 🌻

Thanks for reaching out. This is indeed expected behaviour - typically when a conversation is moved to another inbox, it’s happening because the conversation needs to be handled by a different team so for most Front users, it’s best to unassign as part of the move action.

If that’s not ideal for your team, you could look into setting up a macro that teammates can use to handle the move to retain assignment: Use macros to accelerate your workflows

Cheers,
Cat

It might be the ‘typical’ case but I think it is also equally likely that an inbound mail comes to info@ when it should have come to support@ - but the same individual handles both boxes.  Or an inbox that has no channel at all (a ‘filing cabinet’) where we really don’t want to lose the assignment.

It would be great to have this as an option rather than forced behaviour - especially as there is nothing in a tooltip around a move that explains unassignment is about to happen.  

The ‘archive’ button has a clear tooltip for the unclear side effects: this will not affect subscribers/etc/etc - but “move” doesn’t automatically equate to “move and unassign” in the mind of the user.

And if the inbox move is from one team who handles info@ to another who handles support@ and they cannot deal with each others inboxes except moving _into_ then the unassignment could be announced with a one-time modal dialog.

How would you suggest a macro to preserve the current assignee on an inbox move would work?  I cannot find anything in the documentation that suggests how this would work - there is no way to pass in the ex-assignee to be the new-assignee after a move.

With regards
greg

Hi Greg,

Thanks for reaching out about this! While this is not currently possible in Front, we have an open feature request for this functionality in our Product Ideas Portal which is accessible to all users: https://front.ideas.aha.io/ideas/PRD-I-3953

Feel free to click the Vote button on the left-hand side of the feature request to tell our team how important this update would be for your team. You'll then be subscribed to receive email updates if a feature that you submitted or upvoted is developed and shipped! Exciting

Most of the improvements you see to Front come from ideas and suggestions like yours, so thank you for making Front even better!

No, dynamic variables are only available in the premium plan.  We’re just trying to manage a shared inbox - life should not be this difficult!

Apologies for the inconvenience. I will advocate for the option to have this be configurable. Hopefully it will get some traction.