Message Inbox

Message Inbox lives in the Engage area of the dashboard, under Messaging.

At a glance#

What it does#

Message Inbox is a persistent in-app message list — the channel for things a user should see but does not need to be interrupted by. You compose a message here, choose a priority (Low, Normal, High, Critical), and send it; the backend fans it out to one message per device, and the SDK picks it up on its sync pass and renders it in the in-app inbox.

The fan-out is idempotent, so a retried send does not produce duplicate messages for the same device.

When to use it#

For anything the user should be able to find later. That is the whole distinction from Push: push interrupts and is gone; an inbox message waits.

Good fits: a feature announcement, a policy change, an account notice, the follow-up to something that was pushed. A message that is only relevant for the next ten minutes does not belong here.

Workflow#

1. 1

   Write for someone reading it a week later

   Inbox messages persist, so "tap now to claim" ages badly. Prefer content that is still true when found.

2. 2

   Use priority honestly

   Priority orders the list and can affect presentation. If everything is Critical, the ordering carries no information and the user learns to ignore it.

3. 3

   Send and check delivery

   The campaign list shows delivery state per campaign. A message is delivered per device, so a device that has not synced yet has not received it.

Permissions and prerequisites#

Requires the SDK's inbox support to be enabled and rendered in your app. Sending from here does nothing visible unless the client is set up to display it — see the engagement SDK guide.

Limits and edge cases#

• Per device, not per user. A user on two devices gets the message on both, and reading it on one does not necessarily clear it on the other.

• Delivery is on the SDK's sync schedule, not immediate. A device that is offline receives it when it next syncs, which is the intended behaviour for a persistent channel.

• The web inbox renders in a shadow root, which is what keeps your page styles from leaking into it and vice versa. It also means your global CSS cannot restyle it.

Troubleshooting#

Sent but nothing appears in the app. Two candidates, in order: the SDK's inbox is not mounted in the client, or the device has not synced since the send.

A user says they got it twice. Check whether they have two devices — the fan-out is per device by design, and it is idempotent per device, so a genuine duplicate on one device would be unusual.

Where the data comes from#

A campaign on the inbox channel is fanned out to one message per device — idempotently, so a retried send does not duplicate — and collected by the SDK on its sync pass.

From the SDK

• Engage

Served by

• Engage

• Engage delivery

Related#

• Push

• Engagement SDK guide

• In-app messages

• Coachmarks

• Email

• Deliverability

• Engage overview