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Queue & mailbox management

Queue & mailbox management

Queues in Helpin are mailboxes (also called team inboxes). Every conversation belongs to exactly one mailbox. The shared inbox is the default mailbox that exists in every workspace; you can create additional team inboxes to divide work by team, product, region, or workload.

Mailbox concepts

A mailbox controls:

  • Who belongs to it — the workspace members assigned to the mailbox. Only members see the inbox in their sidebar.

  • How work is assigned — manual assignment, or automatic round-robin.

  • How conversations are routed into it — via manual triage rules, AI routing, or manual moves.

  • How replies are sent — a sender address, inherited from the workspace default or overridden per mailbox.

  • How the AI describes it — an optional routing prompt the AI uses when deciding whether a conversation belongs here.

Creating a team inbox

  1. Click Create Inbox at the bottom of the sidebar (or Add inbox in Settings → Inboxes & Routing).

  2. Give the inbox a name and a short handle (used in URLs and references).

  3. Pick an icon and write an optional description.

  4. Add members — only these members see and work the inbox.

  5. Choose the assignment mode: manual or round-robin.

  6. Optionally set a routing prompt — a sentence describing what belongs in this inbox, used by AI routing.

  7. Save. The inbox appears in every member's sidebar with its own unread count.

Inbox-level settings

From Settings → Inboxes & Routing → Inboxes, each inbox row shows its members, email forwarding address, sender address, and whether rule-based and AI routing apply. Use Configure to edit any of these.

Visibility

Team inboxes are members-only: a conversation in the Billing inbox is invisible to someone who is not a member of it. The shared inbox is visible to everyone with Support access. This keeps queues focused — an engineer working a Bugs inbox does not see the Sales pipeline queue unless they are on it.

The shared inbox

Every workspace starts with one Shared Inbox:

  • Visible to all Support users.

  • The default destination for conversations that are not routed elsewhere.

  • Cannot be deleted, but can be renamed.

  • Counts as the fallback when AI routing has no confident match (unless you configure a different fallback).

Organizing queues

Common patterns:

  • By team: Support, Engineering, Billing — each team works only its queue.

  • By product line: one inbox per product, with routing rules sending conversations by product mention.

  • By function: one inbox for human-work issues and one for issues the AI handles most, so AI escalations land with the right people.

Keep the number of mailboxes small. Routing works best when each inbox has a crisp purpose the AI and rules can distinguish.

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