Managing email conversations in Hiver
Shared Inboxes give your team a shared place to manage customer emails.
This article explains how you can manage a conversation in a Shared Inbox, from the time an email arrives until the request is resolved.
Find conversations that need attention
When a new email arrives in a Shared Inbox, it appears in Unassigned unless it has already been assigned through Auto Assignment or an Automation.
Use the Shared Inbox views to find the conversations you need to work on:
- Unassigned: Conversations that don’t have an owner yet.
- Mine: Conversations assigned to you.
- Team: Conversations assigned across the team.

Open a conversation to view the email and the Hiver controls available for managing it.
Learn how to organize conversations with tags, filters, and views.
Assign conversations
Assign a conversation to make it clear who is responsible for handling it.
From an open conversation, use Assign to in the right panel to assign it to yourself or another teammate.

You can reassign a conversation at any time. To return it to Unassigned for someone else to pick up, set the assignee to None.
When a conversation is assigned, the assignee is notified and can find it with the rest of their assigned work.
Assignments can also happen automatically. Admins can use Auto Assignment or Automations to distribute incoming conversations based on your team’s workflow.
Track conversations with statuses
Statuses help your team keep track of which conversations still need work, which are waiting, and which are resolved.
A conversation can have one of three statuses:
- Open: The conversation still needs attention or work from your team.
- Pending: The conversation is not resolved yet, but your team is waiting for the customer or needs time to gather more information.
- Closed: The customer’s request has been resolved and no further action is currently needed.
You can update the status from the right panel as the conversation progresses. Status changes are recorded in the conversation activity.

Continue working on a conversation
While handling a conversation, you can use other Hiver features to respond, collaborate with your team, stay organized, and get the context you need.
- Reply to the customer: Create Shared Drafts with your team, use email templates, schedule replies for later, or use AI Copilot to summarize context, find information, and help draft your response.
- Organize conversations: Use tags, filters, and views to categorize work and find the conversations you need.
- View customer details: See information about the contact and related customer context while working on the conversation.
- Link related conversations: Connect conversations about the same issue so relevant context stays together.
- Understand SLA timers and alerts: See how much time remains against an SLA and when a conversation is approaching or has reached a breach.