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 (for example Requested, Accepted, In Progress, Completed).
• Date received — When the item arrived in your inbox.
• Requester — Who submitted the request.

Items are sorted by the inbox's configured processing order (set by an admin). The three choices:

• PRIORITY (default) — Urgent and high-priority items appear at the top, with date as the tie-breaker. Best for support-style inboxes where SLA matters more than arrival order.
• FIFO — First-In, First-Out. Oldest items appear at the top regardless of priority. Best for fairness-sensitive intake (HR requests, vendor approvals).
• LIFO — Last-In, First-Out. Newest items appear at the top. Best for queues where stale items lose value (real-time monitoring, today-only requests).

Admins configure the processing order on the inbox's settings page. The choice sets the default order your inbox opens in. You can further shape the view for yourself — which columns show, their order and width, and row density — from the list's own controls (see Customizing Your List View).

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 moves to the destination inbox and waits to be accepted there. It stays visible in your inbox, marked as sent on, so you can still follow it. 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 — Narrow the list to one or more status lanes: To Do, In Progress, or Closed. The filter is multi-select, so you can combine lanes — for example, show To Do and In Progress together — instead of dropping back to a single choice. The control's label reflects the active set (for example, "To Do, In Progress"), and reads All when nothing is selected — applying no status constraint. Your selection sticks per browser and is restored when you reopen or refresh the list.
• By priority — Focus on urgent and high-priority items.
• By service — See requests from a specific service.
• Hide closed over — Drop down to hide items resolved more than 1 day, 3 days, 1 week, 2 weeks (default), 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, or All time ago. Your selection sticks per browser per Company across visits, so a quiet inbox can default to a broader cutoff than a high-volume one.

Customizing Your List View

Your inbox, My Requests, and the admin Requests list all render through the same list view, so they look and behave the same everywhere — and each one remembers how you set it up.

The controls sit at the top-right of the list:

• Columns (sliders icon) — Open the menu and check the fields you want to see; uncheck the ones you don't. Rank (#) and Request ID are always shown and can't be hidden.
• Reorder — Drag a column by the grip handle in its header to move it left or right. Rank and Request ID stay pinned on the far left and can't be moved.
• Resize — Drag a column's right edge to make it wider or narrower. Each column has a minimum and maximum width so the layout stays readable.
• Density (density icon) — Switch between comfortable and compact to trade breathing room for more rows on screen.
• Reset (circular-arrow icon) — Restore the list's original default view, discarding your customizations for that list.
• Refresh (refresh icon) — Click to pull the latest items into the list right now, without losing your place — your scroll position, selection, and active columns, filter, and sort are preserved. A label beside the icon reads "just now" just after a refresh and counts up to "Refreshed X minutes ago", updating on its own so you can see how current the list is. Next to it, an auto-refresh selector lets the list re-check on a schedule — Off (the default), 30 sec, 1 min, 5 min, or 10 min. Your chosen interval is remembered per list, per account, just like your layout. When you switch to another tab and leave this one in the background, auto-refresh pauses — no point polling a list nobody is watching — and the moment you return to the tab it does a single refresh to catch you up, then resumes on your chosen interval. (This only applies when you've set an interval; with auto-refresh Off nothing refreshes on its own either way.)

Your layout is saved for you automatically, per list, and reapplied the next time you open it. Because the preference is tied to your account rather than your browser, it follows you across devices.

Grouping, board view, saved filters, and per-column sorting build on this same view and arrive in upcoming releases. Until then, each list opens in its default order — the inbox's configured processing order here — and you focus it with the filters above.

Live updates

These lists refresh on their own. When a request you're looking at is created, updated, re-ranked, or changes status or priority, the row updates in place — no manual refresh needed.

The Refresh control above works alongside this: live updates keep the list current automatically, and the manual refresh (and any auto-refresh interval you set) is an extra, on-demand way to be sure you're seeing the very latest.

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.