Alps

Managing Conversation Status and Priority

2 min readAug 21, 2026

In this article

Understand the four conversation statuses in your Inbox, how priority works, and how to use both to keep your team focused on what matters most.

Every conversation in your Inbox moves through a status, and can carry a priority. Together they tell your team what needs attention right now and what can wait, without anyone having to read the whole thread first.

The four conversation statuses

Each conversation is always in one of four states:

  • New – a conversation nobody has responded to yet.

  • Open – actively being worked on.

  • Pending – waiting on the customer, or on something outside your control.

  • Resolved – the conversation is done.

Conversations can also be marked as Spam or moved to Deleted, which take them out of the main queue without permanently losing the history.

Setting priority

Priority is separate from status. A conversation can be Open and high priority, or Open and low priority. Use it to flag conversations that need a faster response, for example an angry customer or a time-sensitive request, so teammates scanning the Inbox know what to pick up first.

Automating this
Status and priority can also be changed automatically. If you set up an automation, for example to mark a conversation Pending whenever a customer stops replying, it will update the status for you without anyone touching it manually.

Changing status or priority

Open any conversation and use the status dropdown at the top of the thread to change it. Priority works the same way, from the same conversation view. Changes apply immediately and are visible to your whole team in real time.

Tips

  • Use Pending instead of leaving a conversation Open when you are waiting on the customer. It keeps your active queue accurate.

  • Filter the Inbox by status or priority to build a focused view, for example "Open, high priority" for a triage pass.

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