Understanding Missive's key concepts will help you use the app more effectively. Users who understand these concepts become more productive faster.
Table of Contents
Communication Management
Conversations
Conversations are where collaboration takes place in Missive. Conversations are versatile places that allow users to collaborate around different message sources like email, SMS, live chat, and more. You can even mix different sources into a single conversation. Conversations can be shared or private.
How to tell if a conversation is shared?
You can quickly see when a conversation is shared or private. There are two ways to see this:
- If a conversation has a coloured banner or border, it means it is shared.
- Inside a conversation, on the top left corner, you will see avatars of the people who this conversation is shared with.
Examples of conversations:
- An email with comments from coworkers
- A scoped chat about a social media campaign
- An email with tasks assigned to coworkers
- A labeled email with tasks assigned to you
Personal vs Shared accounts
In Missive, there are two types of accounts: personal accounts and shared accounts. Please note that these are distinct from your Missive account, which is identified by the email address you used to create your profile with us.
Personal accounts
These are accounts that are private, they are not shared with anyone and only you can access them. Like jane92@gmail.com, a Dialpad SMS number, or your Instagram DMs.
Personal account conversations will automatically go to your Inbox, unless configured otherwise. You can always share personal account conversations on demand, in case you need to collaborate with someone on a particular subject.
Shared accounts
These are accounts that are shared with the Users and Teams of an Organization. You can choose which Users and Teams you want to share them with. Like help@company.com, a Dialpad SMS number or the business's Messenger account.
Shared accounts are great for when multiple people need to collaborate together.
Sidebar
In your sidebar, you will find many interesting elements, mailboxes, task views, labels and more. Let’s talk about the most used ones to get started on the right foot:
1. Inbox
The Inbox is a unified mailbox containing all accounts you own or have connected to Missive. It’s also where you'll find everything that requires your attention:
- An email is received in one of your personal accounts.
- A coworker mentions you in a conversation.
- A coworker invites you to a conversation you had no prior access.
- A coworker posts a comment in a conversation you are watching.
- A coworker assigns you to a conversation.
- A closed conversation assigned to you is reopened.
- A conversation you had snoozed reaches its "snoozed until" time.
2. All
The All mailbox is a unified mailbox of all conversations (email, chats, SMS, Messenger, etc) you have access to. It’s the place where absolutely everything (again, that you have access to) can be seen. Such as:
- Archived conversations
- Shared and private chats
- Team rooms or 1-on-1 rooms
- Sent conversations
- Draft conversations
- Snoozed conversations
3. Tasks
The Tasks views are the dedicated places to view and manage all of your tasks! At the top you have your own Tasks view, for all tasks you or coworkers have assigned to you. And below, in each of your teams space, you have access to the Tasks view of those individual teams.
4. Team Inbox
In each of your different team space you will find a Team Inbox mailbox (like Support, in the screenshot above), is a place where shared messages arrive and where people can collaborate around different sources of messages like email accounts, SMS, WhatsApp, etc.
A Team Inbox goes hand in hand with the assignment principle. Assigning a conversation in Missive essentially means delegating responsibility for action to the assignee.
Messages that arrive in a Team Inbox are not in anyone's personal Inbox - they remain in this shared space until assigned. By default, once a conversation has been assigned to someone, it will be removed from the Team Inbox, and moved to the assignee's Inbox. Once a conversation is assigned it can also be found in the team Tasks view.
If you’re an active member of multiple Teams, you can see a unified view of all conversations in the Team Inboxes mailbox. This way you don’t need to monitor multiple, individual Team Inbox.
They are many more elements and mailboxes in your sidebar:
- Snoozed
- Drafts
- Starred
- Trash
- Spam
You can those other elements by clicking the +Pin to sidebar button
ⓘ Further reading
Collaboration
Organizations
In Missive, an organization is a group of people who collaborate together. For example, you could have an organization named Company A that would be composed of everyone working at Company A.
Most people using Missive are part of a single organization, because they work at only one company. However, someone could be part of many organizations. A user could be part of both the Company A and Company B organizations if they work at Company A and also do some consulting work at Company B.
It’s important to understand that organizations are siloed. As soon as a conversation is linked to an organization, it cannot be shared with someone from another organization. In the above scenario, emails and chats exchanged at Company A cannot be shared to people at Company B.
Teams
Teams are managed within an organization. They are used to map company departments and business units like Support, Sales, HR, Production, etc.
When a team is created, it lets you:
- Chat in a specific team room accessible only to team members
- Have a dedicated team inbox where conversations can be triaged by team members
- Share an email account with a team
- Share canned responses with a team
- @mention / invite a team to a conversation
- Share conversations with a team upon applying a shared label.
Each team has its own dedicated space in the sidebar where you can find the Team Inbox, its tasks, and its chat room.
ⓘ Further reading
Productivity
Labels
Labels are how you can keep things nice and neat in Missive. If you’re coming from Gmail, labels are still labels. If you’re coming from Outlook, then think of labels as folders. In both cases labels do the job of organizing your conversations.
Missive offers two kinds of labels: email labels, which sync with your email accounts. And organization labels, which are tied to your Missive organization, and don’t sync to an email account. An organization label can be applied to any conversation, whether it's an email, SMS, social media or an internal chat conversation.
Rules
Rules are a powerful way to automate your team workflows. They can be executed when a message (email, SMS, Instagram DM, Facebook message, WhatsApp, etc ) comes in or out of an inbox. They can also be defined on some user actions like applying/removing a label, changing the status of a conversation (assigned/closed/reopened) or by posting a new comment.
Missive rules work exactly like Outlook 365 rules and Gmail filters. When all or any of the rule conditions are met, the automated actions defined on the rule are triggered.
Just like accounts and conversations, rules can be created for personal or for organizational (shared) messages.
Best practices
Archive, archive, archive
Missive operates on the principle that a conversation should be archived once it's been handled. In theory, any email that remains in your Inbox or Team Inbox is there because it hasn't been addressed yet, or because you received a new reply that needs your attention.
Archiving emails is a useful way to manage emails that no longer require your attention. It helps you to declutter your inbox while preserving emails for future reference in a different mailbox, other than your Inbox.
ⓘ Further reading
Next section: Quick start
