Inbox Apps Terminology

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Inbox Apps are in beta.

Inbox Apps are currently in beta. APIs are subject to change.

🔗 Learn more about building Inbox Apps here.

This guide explains common terms you'll encounter when building an Inbox Apps integration.

Published Inbox App

A Published Inbox App is your application that a Follow Up Boss customer would install. These are public Inbox Apps built by Follow Up Boss partners and will usually integrate with their messaging systems.

Inbox App

An Inbox App is a specific instance of a Published Inbox App that is installed for a given Follow Up Boss account. A single Published Inbox App can be installed multiple times in an account, each of which are a unique Inbox App. There are two types of Inbox App scopes.

• Account-Wide Scope: When an admin installs an Inbox App account-wide, it has access to all User and Team Inboxes on the account.
• User Scope: When a user installs an Inbox App for their Inbox, the Inbox App has access only to that user's Inbox.

As an example, a single FUB account may have an account-wide installation of the ACME Inbox App, as well as two user installations. Each Inbox App would have its own ID, reply webhook specified by the partner, and have its access limited (or not) depending on how it was installed.

Inbox

This refers to a Follow Up Boss inbox, accessible from the top-level navigation in FUB. An Inbox is a unified view of communications from many different mediums including email, text messages, calls, and Inbox Apps.

Team Inbox

Sometimes referred to as a Shared Inbox, Team Inboxes are accessible to multiple users within Follow Up Boss. Only account-wide installations of an Inbox App can add conversations to Team Inboxes, although users can freely reassign conversations out to other inboxes and users from within FUB.

User Inbox

Each Follow Up Boss user has their own dedicated inbox that contain communications coming into their personal email or phone number. Both account-wide and user Inbox App installations for a given user can add conversations to User Inboxes.

Only the user can view the contents of their inbox. They are not visible to other users, including admin users.

Inbox Conversation

Inbox records take the form of conversations. A conversation is correlated to a single medium (for example, text messages or Inbox App messages) and a single Person (contact) if one is available.

Conversation Ownership & Assignment

Each conversation has an owning Inbox and can also have an assigned Inbox.

• Owning Inboxes: The owner of the conversation is determined when the conversation begins and is considered to be immutable. The owner of a conversation will always be able to see and reassign the conversation, even if it has been assigned to another Inbox.
• Assigned Inbox: A conversation can be assigned to another User or Team Inbox which grants visibility of that conversation to the assigned User or members of a Team Inbox, and grants them the ability to reply to the conversation.

External Conversation ID

An External Conversation ID is a unique ID generated by a partner and used when sending messages to Follow Up Boss. External IDs are mapped 1:1 to a Inbox Apps conversation. When you present a new External Conversation ID while adding a message that we have not seen before, we will treat it as a new conversation. When you present one we have seen before, we will add the message to the existing conversation.

External Message ID

An External Message ID is a unique ID generated by a partner used to uniquely identify a specific message, and is used for deduplication to prevent the double-posting of messages.

Notes

Inbox Apps can also add notes to conversations. Notes are only visible from within Follow Up Boss, are not sent to the conversation's Person (contact), and there are no webhooks raised for notes added to conversations.