Overview of Shared Inboxes (Help Desk)

Use Help Desk to manage conversations from shared inboxes you can access. Browse work by inbox, customer, or teammate, then open a conversation to respond, assign ownership, or collaborate.

If your shared inbox is not connected yet, start with Setting Up the Help Desk.

The conversation preview section displays all messages from your connected shared inboxes, including email and phone conversations.

Within each preview, you can quickly see:

This makes it easy to understand context and ownership at a glance.

In Settings, under Layout, you'll find several customization options:

Show or Hide Preview Text:

Display the first line of each email for more context, or hide it to reduce the amount of space previews take up on your screen.

Add Quick Actions:

Enable hover actions on your conversation previews for faster inbox management.

Quick actions include:

These shortcuts help you triage messages quickly without opening the full conversation.

Customer groups now live in their own dedicated Customers tab, right next to Inbox at the top of the screen — rather than as a section tucked inside the Help Desk view.

From Customers, you can view:

And filter by customer type: Owners, Prospects, Residents, and Vendors.

Click into any customer to see their full contact record, including:

This makes it easy to keep track of ongoing communication by customer segment, and to get the full picture on any one contact in a single place.

The Team section allows you to add teammates from your organization.

Each teammate's folder displays all conversations assigned to that user, giving managers or support leads a quick way to review workload and activity by person.

You can drag and drop conversations directly into folders within a shared inbox.

Just hold down on a conversation and drag it to your desired folder. All available folders will appear on the left for easy access.

This small but powerful feature makes inbox organization much faster.

AI Agents, suggested replies, and the AI Assistant are distinct features. Availability depends on your organization's enabled features, configuration, and permissions. If a control is missing, ask your administrator or Aptly Support to confirm access to that specific feature.

Aptly's AI features have grown well beyond simple suggestions, and now center on AI Agents — agents that can pick up a conversation before a person ever sees it.

You'll find a dedicated Agent Activities section in your sidebar, above Mine, with three views:

In Table view, these same statuses show up in an Agent Activity column as Human requested, Agent working, and Agent handled.

Inside any conversation an agent is handling, you'll see a banner reading "AI is handling this conversation" with a Pause AI option (to take over yourself right now) and an Adjust agent based on this conversation option (to correct the agent's behavior going forward — wrong information, wrong tone, should have escalated, missed an action, or shouldn't have responded at all).

Whether an agent drafts replies for a person to approve, or sends them automatically, is configured ahead of time in your AI config settings, not chosen message by message.

Every conversation also has a row above the reply box with a blue sparkle button (generates or refreshes suggested replies) and a few suggested reply chips next to it — click one to drop that text into your reply, then edit it before sending. Nothing in this row sends on its own.

Separate from AI Agents, there's also an AI Assistant panel you can open on demand in any conversation — click the sparkle icon in the top toolbar (or press Option+Shift+A). It opens a side panel with two tabs, Conversation and Knowledge, plus a few one-click actions:

There's also a free-text box ("Ask me anything...") if none of the quick actions fit what you need.

A few of these are worth explaining specifically:

This replaces the old Conversation Summary feature — instead of a summary appearing automatically at the top of every conversation, you now pull one on demand with Summarize this email. Sentiment Analysis is moving to the contact level rather than showing on individual conversations, so look for it on a customer's contact record going forward instead of in the conversation itself.

Every conversation has a Details tab next to Conversation, with:

If a card is attached, it will display automatically in this section so you can see all related information in one view.

You can open a contact record from Customers or from the conversation's related-contact controls. The route differs between Table and Preview view; see Pop-Out Panel: Conversation Details & Related Cards for both paths.

Instead of forwarding emails, Aptly allows you to share conversations with teammates.

Sharing keeps the entire conversation history intact while ensuring everyone involved has full visibility. Click the participants icon at the top of a conversation to see who it's shared with, or invite someone new.

You can also mention teammates in comments — they'll see those conversations in their Mentions view under the Customers tab.

The old "Shared with Me" folder is now called Following, under Mine. When you share a conversation with someone, they start following it — that's what lands it in their Following folder.

If your organization has enabled email open tracking, the eye icon shows recorded open activity. Hover over it to see the available details. The count is not proof that a recipient read or understood the message. For setup and notification options, see Email Read Receipt Tracking.

The Help Desk brings together the best of Aptly — collaboration, visibility, and automation — so your team can manage communications efficiently and confidently.

From shared inboxes to AI Agents and drag-and-drop actions, it's designed to help your team spend less time searching and more time responding.