The inbox

Where: /inbox

The inbox is where the comment → DM automations land: people answered a video, an automation opened a conversation with them, and at some point one of them asks something it cannot answer. It is a messaging client, not an automation screen: drawing, posing and reading the automations happens on Automations (the link at the top right of the inbox) and in Analytics.

It covers the Instagram channels of the current scope, and only those. With no Instagram in the brand you are in, the page offers to take you to one — see Brands and scope.

Conversations

The only tab. Threads on the left, the open thread on the right: bubbles, attachments, the button templates the automations send, and story replies rendered with the story they answer. At the bottom, Your reply… — Enter sends.

The first time a channel opens, the whole inbox is read, slice after slice, until Instagram runs out of threads; the counter under the list says how many are in and reading older… while it goes. After that only the 60 most recent threads are polled, every 20 seconds for the list and every 10 seconds for the thread you have open, while the tab is visible. A Meta webhook pushes new messages in between, and Refresh re-reads everything.

The four boxes

Above the list, four counters:

Box	What is in it
To reply	The default. Somebody said something and nobody has answered
Conversations	Real exchanges, past the automatic part
Full auto	Threads where only the automation has spoken
All	Everything

The sort is done on [box, last message from the person], so an automatic message never pushes a genuine question down the list. That ordering is the whole point of the boxes.

Note

These are our boxes. Instagram does not expose its own Primary / General / Requests folders through the API, so they cannot be mirrored here.

Marking a thread read

A thread where the person spoke last sits in To reply until you answer — or until you say it needs no answer:

• ✓ Mark as read — the ✓ on the row (on hover, on a desktop) or the button in the header of the open thread. The thread leaves To reply and files under Conversations.
• A reply that is only a thanks, an ok or an emoji is classified on its own: UseNadia files it without waiting for you, tagged nothing to answer (a thread you marked yourself is tagged read).
• Back to reply, in the header of a thread you dismissed, undoes it.

A new message from the person always brings the thread back to To reply. And a DM sent by an automation never counts as a reply: someone who was waiting for you and then triggers a flow is still waiting for you.

Caution

Replies are bounded by Instagram’s 24 hour window. You can only message someone within 24 hours of their last message to you. Past that, sending fails with Could not send (24 h window closed?) and there is nothing to retry.

Getting there from a video

The inbox is not the only door. A published Instagram post on the calendar offers View comments — reply publicly, hide, delete — and Automate comments on this post, both detailed in Post actions and statistics; the Automations tab of Analytics lists the people each pose caught, with their email and an Export CSV.

Use the inbox when the question is “what is waiting for me”, and the analytics tab when it is “did this video convert”.

On a phone

Below 768 px the tab becomes master/detail: picking a conversation replaces the list with the thread, and ← goes back. Otherwise selecting a thread would change a panel further down the page than the screen.

From the terminal

Everything here is on the Public API — list conversations, read one, send a message — and the agent reads the same inbox and sends a reply once you confirm it.