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, attaching 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 workspace you are in, the page offers to take you to one, see Workspaces 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.

UseNadia keeps a copy of every message in your Instagram conversations: the ones people send you and the ones the account sends, whether you wrote them here, in the Instagram app, or an automation sent them. The inbox reads that copy, not Instagram: the list is complete, with no cap on the number of threads, and the open thread comes from the same copy.

• New messages come in through Meta’s webhook, within seconds. The list and the open thread update on their own while the tab is visible.
• A catch-up runs every hour and re-reads the conversations from Instagram, for anything a webhook missed.
• The older history of each conversation is fetched in the background, slowly enough to stay under Instagram’s limits: older threads fill in over the following hours.
• Refresh re-reads the top of the inbox from Instagram right away (the conversations that moved last), without waiting for the catch-up.

The four boxes

Above the list, four counters, computed by the server over the whole inbox:

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.

What the automations know about the person

Under the person’s name, in the open thread, their tags: one chip per automation they triggered, with the word they wrote (AWS kit · kit), and a #label chip for every label a flow put on them. A ×3 means they triggered it three times; the date of the last time shows on hover. Past seven, + N more shows the rest. Nothing to set up: the tags are read off what the automations did, including before today.

In the thread, the automations’ messages are folded: the keyword, the card sent, the button tapped, the email left, the link sent make one line, + 5 automation messages. A click unfolds them, dimmed. What stays visible is what the person actually said and what you answered.

Quoting a message

To answer one message in particular, as in the Instagram app: hover a bubble (on a phone, tap it), then ↩ Reply. The quoted message shows above the text box, with its author; the × cancels. Your answer goes out with the quote, and the person sees it in Instagram as a reply to that message.

A bubble that quotes a message shows an excerpt of the quoted message above its text. When that one is not loaded in the thread (older), it simply says Quoted message.

Note

Instagram only says a message quotes another one when it arrives. Quotes therefore show on messages received live and on yours; an older message, caught up by the hourly sync or the history, shows without its quote.

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 attached template 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.