Touring the Inbox

Written By Chad McGuire (Sparrow Intel)

Overview

Open Sparrow Intel and click Conversations in the left navigation. This lesson walks you around the screen so the rest of the curriculum has somewhere to land.

💡 Open the portal in a second tab while you read this. Everything below references things you'll see live.

The inbox layout

Open Conversations and you're looking at the inbox — three regions, left to right:

The list is where you live, the left rail is how you slice it, and the filters panel is how you slice it finer.

📌 The message thread and the conversation's reservation/AI context don't appear on this screen. They open when you click a conversation — that's the next lesson, Anatomy of a Conversation. The inbox is the list; a conversation is what's inside one.

Regions

Left — Navigation railYour views and channels. All Conversations, My Conversations, Unassigned, and Closed — each with a live count — plus a Channels section listing every connected channel (PMS, Email, …). A Compose Email button sits at the bottom.
Center — Conversation listEvery conversation in the selected view. A search box on top; a toolbar with select-all, the filter (funnel) toggle, refresh, and a more menu; one row per conversation; page controls at the bottom.
Right — Filters panelA collapsible panel you open with the funnel icon in the toolbar. It stays hidden until you ask for it — covered in Filtering and finding conversations below.

Filtering and finding conversations

Above the conversation list you'll find filters that narrow what's shown:

  • Status — Open, Closed, or All
  • Assignment — Mine, Unassigned, or a specific teammate
  • Channel — Airbnb, Email, Booking.com, etc.
  • Property / Property Group — limit to a specific property or a group you've defined
  • Sentiment — Positive, Negative, Neutral, Mixed
  • Label — any custom label your team has applied

Filters stack. "Unassigned + Negative + last 7 days" is a perfectly normal triage view.

There's also a search box at the top. It searches the body of every message in your conversations, not just titles, so "broken AC" or a guest's last name will both work.

Reading the conversation list

Each row in the list packs in a lot of signal. From left to right you'll typically see:

  • Avatar / channel icon — Airbnb, email, etc.
  • Guest name and a short preview of the most recent message
  • Property alias — which listing this is about
  • Unread dot — bold means unread
  • Star — your personal flag (only you see it)
  • Sentiment chip — color-coded (green/yellow/red/grey)
  • Assignee avatar — who owns this conversation
  • Timestamp — relative time of the most recent message

Hovering over any row shows quick actions (mark read/unread, star, assign to me).

Real-time presence

If a teammate is also looking at a conversation, you'll see their avatar at the top of the middle pane. If they're typing a reply, a typing indicator appears. This is intentional — it stops two people from writing the same reply twice.

You don't need to do anything to enable this; it just works as long as your browser tab is open.

Pagination and performance

The list loads 25 conversations at a time. Scroll to the bottom and click Load more for the next 25. Filters and search apply across your entire history, not just what's loaded.

For organizations with very high inbound volume, we recommend keeping the Status: Open filter on by default. Closed conversations stay searchable but don't clog your active queue.

Try it

  1. Open Conversations
  2. Set the filter to Unassigned + Open
  3. Open the most recent conversation
  4. Look at the right-hand context panel — note the reservation, the sentiment, and any AI-extracted insights
  5. Look at the top of the middle pane — see your own avatar in the presence area

That's the loop you'll repeat hundreds of times. Everything else is detail.

Up next

Anatomy of a Conversation — now that you can find conversations, let's break down what's actually inside one.