The new Inbox is here!

We're excited to release one of our biggest efforts over the past year: a complete redesign of the Inbox. It's more than a facelift—we've added some of the most commonly requested features, and a few surprises!

A brand new design

We believe that software should be functional and beautiful. A pleasure to use and look at. We think you'll agree that our new Inbox is thoughtfully designed, feature-rich, and user-friendly. We think it's some of our best work yet.

Full conversation history + context

A major complaint from our users was not being able to see the full context of incoming texts. Well, no more!

You can now see a complete history of incoming and outgoing text messages for every contact when you're working in the Inbox. This is helpful for seeing someone's full journey (e.g. from texting your keyword to asking for prayer) and any previous conversations you've had.

But more than just seeing the text message content, you get a very clear picture of who sent each text. For example, was it part of a keyword workflow? A bulk text sent to the entire church? Or was it sent by a team member using the Planning Center Add-On or our Slack app? Now, all those details are displayed within every conversation.

Better organized, automatically

Conversations are now automatically categorized into Open, Unread, and Done. When someone texts your number, a conversation is started and will show in the Open tab. When you're done with a conversation, you can mark it Done. This is the easiest way to keep your Inbox organized.

In addition, the Unread tab displays all the conversations that have unread messages so you can prioritize what to respond to.

Conversations can be marked done, re-opened, marked as unread, etc. You'll always be able to see the full conversation history when you're texting someone.

Start a new conversation

Amazingly, and to my great personal shame, you previously couldn't start a new conversation from the Inbox. Well, now you can! When creating a new conversation you can easily search for someone by their name or number, or even create a new contact. It's fast and intuitive.

Convenient quick actions

Responding to incoming texts quickly is a great way to signal to your church that you're actually reading their texts. One major goal with the redesign was to make it easy to respond quickly and navigate through multiple conversations. Now you can just hover over a conversation and toggle Open/Done and Unread/Read.

Multi-select for bulk editing

"How do I archive all five thousand threads in my inbox?" 😬

Good news! We've made it easy to quickly select hundreds (thousands?) of conversations in your Inbox and perform bulk actions.

See when another user is typing

A shared inbox is great because anyone on your team can respond to incoming texts. But if multiple people are responding at once, they could accidentally respond at the same time! To mitigate this issue, when viewing a conversation, you can now see when someone on your team is typing a response.

Fast and smart search

We've improved the search experience to make it faster and easier to find specific contacts, keywords, phrases, etc. across all conversations in your Inbox. Once you find what you're looking for, you can quickly jump to the relevant spot in the conversation.

Send a video or note

When texting your entire church it's easy to attach Notes and Videos, but previously these powerful features weren't available for one-on-one conversations. With this update, we've brought them over to the Inbox.

Separate inboxes for each number

If you have multiple numbers in your account (i.e. a dedicated short code and a long code), previously all conversations on both numbers were mixed together. Now, each number's conversations are separate; another improvement to make managing your Inbox a little easier.

What about the mobile app?!

We're nearly finished with a much-needed mobile app refresh, which will include the updated Inbox, along with a lot of other exciting features. As usual, we obsess over stability and polish, so it's taking a little longer than we wanted. But the end result is going to be great!

If you'd like to get more specific updates on our mobile app refresh, or if you have feedback on the new Inbox, send a message to support or email me directly at trevor (at) clearstream (dot) io.