Understanding Missive's key concepts will enable you to use the app more efficiently. Users who grasp these concepts typically achieve better results 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
- A Messenger exchange with a customer
- An email with a potential partner
- A chat room of the Support team
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 always be directed to your Inbox, unless stated 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.
Mailboxes
Think of mailboxes as containers of conversations, each with its own scope. Do you want to see all messages you’ve sent, go the to Sent mailbox. What about things that have been assigned to me? Go the the Assigned to me mailbox.
Let’s talk about the most used mailboxes and what they are:
1. Inbox
The Inbox is a unified mailbox of all accounts you own, or that you connected to Missive. It’s also a place of everything that concerns you:
- 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
- Assigned to Me conversations
- Assigned to Others conversations
3. Comments
The Comments mailbox is a place where you can see the internal chat messages you’ve posted in the app. These can be about:
- External communication: Have internal discussions around messages received from outside the company (email, SMS, etc.).
- On-demand conversations: Invite specific people and start a discussion on a particular topic, read more.
- General room: Chat with everyone in the organization.
- Team rooms: Discuss ideas with people from a given team.
- One-to-one rooms: Have private conversations with a coworker.
4. Team Inbox
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 Inbox, they’re in this specific shared place, or mailbox, called Team Inbox. 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. You will also find it in other mailboxes, such as the Assigned to me, All and other people can also see it in the Assigned to Others.
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.
Additional examples of mailboxes:
- Snoozed
- Drafts
- Starred
- Trash
- Spam
You can always find other mailboxes by clicking the +More 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.
ⓘ 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
