Channels in your inbox
Choose which of the channels you are allowed to use actually show up in your inbox — without giving up access to any of them.
Email accounts and phone numbers belong to your workspace, not to whoever connected them. That is what makes CommSync a shared inbox. But it also means an owner or admin, who can use every channel, ends up with every conversation in the company in one list.
Inbox channels separates two questions that used to be one:
- Access — can you use this channel? Org-wide, set by an owner or admin.
- Your inbox — do you want to look at it? Private to you, and yours to change.
When you hide a channel from your inbox, you only set a view preference. It never removes access, never affects a teammate's inbox, and you can undo it with one switch.
Your selection also steers the Home dashboard. An owner or admin who narrows their inbox here overrides Home's default rule — the page then reads exactly the channels you selected.
Nothing is taken away
With a channel hidden, you can still send and reply from it. You can still open a thread on it from a link a teammate shares, and you can still manage it in Settings. You can still find it with All org channels in search. Only your inbox list changes.
Turn a channel on or off
Open the channel's settings page
Settings → Email accounts for mailboxes, Settings → Phone numbers for SMS lines. This page lists every channel you can use.
Flip “Show in my inbox”
Each row carries a switch. Off hides that channel's conversations from your inbox immediately. On brings them back.
Wait for history the first time you add one
The first time you turn on a channel, it shows Adding history… while CommSync pulls that channel's past conversations into your view. It runs in the background — keep working, and the threads appear as they land.
The header on both pages tells you where you stand: Inbox shows all channels, or In your inbox · 3 of 11 channels. A Show all channels in my inbox link undoes the whole thing at once.
One selection, both pages
Mailboxes and phone lines share a single selection. The count on the Phone numbers page includes your email accounts, and vice versa. You never have to check two places to know what your inbox shows.
JustCall and Twilio accounts
Provider account headers on the Phone numbers page carry their own switch, labeled with how many numbers it covers ("Includes its 6 numbers"). It is a bulk control over that account's lines — you can still hide or show any single number underneath it afterwards.
What admins keep
If you are an owner or admin, here is one place worth an explicit note. This is what does not change when you narrow your inbox:
| Before you narrow | After you narrow | |
|---|---|---|
| Send and reply on any channel | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open a thread from a shared link | ✓ | ✓ |
| Manage channels and assign access | ✓ | ✓ |
| Search every org channel | ✓ | ✓ (see below) |
| Those conversations in your inbox list | ✓ | — |
The first time an admin on a busy workspace opens CommSync, CommSync offers to narrow the inbox for them. It shows exactly which lines it would keep and why ("You connected this", "Your default sending line"). It never applies on its own, and it only ever asks once.
Search a hidden channel
Search follows your inbox by default, which is usually what you want. When it is not — you remember a message but it lived on a line you have hidden — the results pane offers All org channels.
The toggle only appears if you have actually narrowed your inbox; for everyone else it changes nothing. When a search comes back empty on a narrowed inbox, the empty state offers the same thing: Not finding it? Search all org channels.
Because presence is a preference, not a permission, that toggle never reaches anything beyond what you can already open. It only overrides your own choice to leave the channel out of view.
Promotions and new members
A promotion does not flood your inbox
When someone promotes a member to admin, the member gains access to every channel in the workspace. CommSync does not dump the whole company's mail into their inbox. It keeps their inbox on the channels they already had and records the rest as available. They can add any of them from Settings whenever they want.
New channels connected while your inbox shows all channels appear automatically. If you have narrowed it, they do not — a channel you never chose must not arrive uninvited. Add it from its settings page when you want it.
An example
Priya owns the workspace at Lakeside Academy. It has eleven channels: the two mailboxes she connected (priya@lakeside.example, admissions@lakeside.example), her own SMS line, and eight lines that belong to the front-office and facilities teams.
She narrows her inbox to her three. Her inbox goes quiet and specific. She can still text a parent from the front-office line when she covers a shift. She can still open the facilities thread a colleague pastes into chat, and she can still reassign channel access from Settings. She can still find last March's vendor invoice with All org channels. When she takes over facilities in the summer, she flips those two lines back on, and their history backfills into her view.