Managing Your Inbox
Inboxes are where work arrives in Nembl. Every team, service, and individual has an inbox where incoming requests land for review and action. Your personal inbox is your central hub for staying on top of assigned work.
What Is an Inbox?
An inbox is a prioritized list of requests and tasks that need your attention. Think of it as your to-do list, populated automatically as work flows through the system. There are several types of inboxes:
- Personal inbox — Your individual inbox showing tasks and requests assigned to you.
- Team inbox — Shared inbox for your team, showing requests that need someone on the team to pick up.
- Service inbox — Inbox for a specific service, showing all incoming requests for that service.
You can view your personal inbox from the Inboxes section in the sidebar. If you belong to teams, you can also see your team inboxes.
Viewing Requests in Your Inbox
Your inbox shows a list of items, each displaying:
- Request title — What the request is about.
- Service and offering — Which service the request belongs to.
- Priority — The urgency level (Low, Medium, High, Urgent).
- Status — Where the request stands (Pending, In Progress, Forwarded, etc.).
- Date received — When the item arrived in your inbox.
- Requester — Who submitted the request.
Items are sorted by priority and date by default. Urgent and high-priority items appear at the top.
Taking Action on Requests
When you open a request from your inbox, you can take several actions:
Accepting a Request
Click Accept to indicate that you or your team will handle this request. Accepting a request:
- Changes its status to In Progress in your inbox.
- Triggers the linked workflow, if one is configured.
- Notifies the requester that their request has been picked up.
Rejecting a Request
Click Reject if the request cannot be fulfilled. You will be asked to provide a reason. Rejecting a request:
- Moves it out of your inbox.
- Changes the request status to Rejected.
- Notifies the requester with your explanation.
Use rejection when a request does not meet acceptance criteria, is a duplicate, or is submitted to the wrong service.
Forwarding a Request
Click Forward to send the request to another inbox (a different team or individual). This is useful when:
- The request arrived in the wrong inbox.
- Another team is better suited to handle it.
- You need to escalate to a manager or specialist.
When you forward, the request appears in the destination inbox with a Pending status, while your inbox shows it as Forwarded. See Routing and Forwarding for more details.
Returning a Request
If a request was forwarded to you but you cannot handle it, click Return to send it back to the inbox it came from. Include a note explaining why so the original team can reroute it.
Inbox Organization
Filtering
Use filters to focus on what matters:
- By status — See only pending items, or only items in progress.
- By priority — Focus on urgent and high-priority items.
- By service — See requests from a specific service.
Sorting
Change the sort order to organize your view:
- Priority — Highest priority first (default).
- Date received — Newest or oldest first.
- Status — Group by current status.
Team Inboxes
If you manage a team, the team inbox shows all requests assigned to the team. From here, you can:
- See what is waiting to be picked up.
- Assign requests to specific team members.
- Monitor the team's workload and identify bottlenecks.
- Forward requests that belong to another team.
Team members can also pull requests from the team inbox into their personal inbox by accepting them.
Staying on Top of Your Inbox
- Check your inbox regularly. New items arrive as requests are submitted and workflows route work to you.
- Act on urgent items first. The default sort puts them at the top for a reason.
- Do not let items sit. If you cannot handle something, forward it or return it so someone else can.
- Use notifications. Set up alerts so you know when new items arrive. See Notification Preferences.