Messages
Messages holds your client conversations. It is real email. What you send lands in their normal inbox, and their reply comes back here.
The value isn't that it's another inbox. It's that every conversation stays attached to the person and the job it belongs to, so a year later you can see what you agreed and when.
The sidebar shows an unread count beside Messages, and hovering it on desktop reveals a plus for New message.
Where conversations come from
Most start on their own:
- An inquiry, when someone inquires through your booking page
- An intake form submission
- You, writing to a contact
- Sending a document, when you email a proposal, invoice, contract, questionnaire or booking
That last kind stays out of sight until the client actually replies, so sending fifty invoices doesn't fill Messages with fifty threads you don't need to read. When one of them does get a reply, the whole thread appears, document and all.
The list
The left column is your conversation list. Each row shows who it's with, the subject, a preview of the last message, when it arrived and an unread count. A paperclip means there are attachments. A red marker means something in it could not be delivered.
Above it sit two controls.
The view menu, which starts on All:
| View | What's in it |
|---|---|
| All messages | Every live conversation |
| Unread | The ones with something you haven't read |
| Archived | Filed away, kept |
| Bin | Deleted, on a timer |
Search, which matches the subject, the preview of the most recent message, and the name or email of whoever you're talking to. It searches inside the view you're in, not across all of them.
Longer histories load a page at a time with Load older at the bottom.
What a thread is attached to
A conversation that came from a piece of work carries a small chip next to its subject: Inquiry, Proposal, Invoice, Contract, Questionnaire or Booking. It's how you tell a general exchange from the thread about a specific job.
The contact's name sits under the subject at the top of the thread, and clicking it opens their record.
What you can do with a thread
Hover a row and a three-dot menu appears. The same menu sits at the top right of an open thread. Both give you:
- Mark as read or Mark as unread
- Archive, or Restore if it's already archived
- Move to Bin
Archiving is the one to reach for. It clears the list without losing anything, and the conversation stays on the contact's record.
Archiving isn't final in either direction. Reply to an archived conversation, or receive a new message in one, and it comes straight back to All messages.
The Bin
Move to Bin asks you to confirm, then keeps the conversation for 30 days before deleting it for good. During that time it sits in the Bin view. That view carries a note reading "Items auto-delete after 30 days" and shows each conversation's own deadline.
You can't reply from the Bin. Open a binned thread and the reply box is replaced by "Restore this conversation before writing a reply." A new message from the client restores it on its own.
Two ways to finish early: Delete permanently on a single thread, or Empty bin to clear all of them. Both are permanent, and both take the attachments with them.
It's tied to the contact
Every conversation belongs to a contact, so the same exchange appears on their record under Message threads. Open a client from six months ago and the whole history is there.
This is what makes it worth using rather than replying from your own mail app, though CoreHue handles that case too. See Replying from your own email.
Sending limits
You can send up to 200 messages a day, and up to 20 in any ten minutes. Both are far above normal use and exist to stop an account being abused. If you hit one, you'll be told in plain words.