Assignments and ownership

An assignment answers “who has this?” on the screen instead of in someone’s head. It is the difference between a shared inbox and four people reading the same mail.

Assigning

Click the assignee pill in the reader header, or hover a row in the list and use its assign button. Assign to yourself, to a teammate, or clear it to put the conversation back in the unassigned queue. The picker shows a dot beside each name: green when they are available, grey when busy.

Everyone sees the owner on the row, so the second person to open a conversation knows immediately that it is handled. The person assigned gets a notification, and the assignment shows in the conversation’s timeline.

Replying assigns. The first reply into a conversation nobody owns makes the sender its owner. Answering is claiming.

The unassigned queue

Every shared inbox worked as an assignment queue has one: the Unassigned tab it opens on. It is the shared to-do list, and it should trend towards empty. The sidebar badge counts it, so a growing number is a visible signal rather than a discovery. Reading a conversation does not clear it; assigning does.

An inbox can instead be worked as a general inbox, where the badge is your unread count and nobody assigns anything. That is set per inbox in Settings → Inboxes → Edit; see Connect a shared inbox.

Your queue

Assigned to me in the sidebar is everything you own across every inbox, with the open count beside it. The Assigned Conversations section below it shows the same number for each teammate, so the load is visible without a report.

Availability

Click your name at the foot of the sidebar and choose Busy (pauses assignments). Teammates see it as a grey dot beside your name, and round-robin rules skip you. It does not stop a teammate assigning you directly, on purpose: if someone needs you, they can still say so. Turn it back to Available when you are free; nothing does it for you.

Round-robin

A rule can assign automatically, cycling through the members of the inbox the mail arrived in and skipping anyone marked busy. If everyone is busy the conversation waits in the unassigned queue. Useful once volume outgrows someone watching the queue.

It is deliberately not the default. Automatic assignment on a small team produces a lot of reassignment, which is worse than picking things up.

What assignment does not do

It does not lock anyone out. Any member can still open, reply to, or reassign a conversation someone else owns. Ownership of a reply that is being written is a separate thing, tracked on the draft itself: see Shared drafts.