Support Inbox
Receive and answer messages your members send to your project bot, without leaving Subscriby.
By the end of this page you'll know how members reach you, where their messages land, and how to answer from the dashboard or straight from Telegram.
Your project bot already handles commands, checkouts and access codes. The support inbox handles everything else: when a member types something the bot doesn't recognise, it becomes a support conversation instead of an error message.
This is on by default. Any project with a connected bot already accepts support messages — there is nothing to switch on. Open Support Inbox in the project sidebar to see what has arrived.
What becomes a support message
A member's message lands in the inbox when it is not any of the following:
- A recognised bot command (
/start,/plans, and the rest). - An access code — those still redeem as normal.
- An answer the bot was waiting for. If the bot has just asked a member a question as part of a flow, their reply goes to that flow, not to your inbox.
Everything else arrives: plain text, photos, videos, voice notes, documents, stickers, locations and shared contacts. A photo sent with no caption arrives too — before the inbox existed, that got the member an "I can't understand your command" reply.
One thread per member
There is exactly one conversation per member, per channel. It's a chat thread, not a ticket queue, so a member who writes to you in March and again in September lands in the same thread with all the history intact.
This is why resolving is not closing. Resolving clears a conversation out of your open queue; if the member writes again, the thread reopens by itself and comes back to the top.
The inbox
Open Support Inbox from the project sidebar. The page is two panes: conversations on the left, the selected thread on the right. The sidebar item carries a badge with your unread count.
Five tabs across the top narrow the list:
| Tab | Shows |
|---|---|
| All Conversations | Everything, newest activity first. |
| Open | Needs attention. |
| Pending | Waiting on the member. |
| Assigned to Me | Threads handed to you specifically. |
| Resolved | Answered and cleared — kept, not deleted. |
Search matches the member's name and the text of any message in the thread, so you can find a conversation by something the member said months ago.
The inbox is per project. Each project's bot has its own members and its
own inbox, reached from that project's sidebar. If you run several projects,
switch project to switch inbox — there is no combined view in the dashboard.
(The API and the MCP
tools can read across projects in
one call, and both take a project_id filter.)
Answering
From the dashboard
Open a thread and type in the composer at the bottom. Your reply reaches the member on Telegram, prefixed with your display name so it reads as coming from a person rather than from the bot.
The right-hand pane also shows you who you're talking to — their status, current plan, member-since date and how many times they've written — so you can answer without opening another page.
Attachments go both ways. Drop a file into the composer to send it; media a member sends you renders inline in the thread.
From Telegram
When a member writes, Subscriby sends you a Telegram DM on the Subscriby bot with a summary of who they are and what they said, plus two buttons:
- Reply — type your answer straight into the DM and it goes to the member.
- Open Inbox — a magic link into the dashboard thread, already signed in.
This is what makes support workable from a phone. You never have to open the dashboard to answer.
You get one DM per conversation per five minutes. A member sending ten messages in a burst produces one notification, not ten. Everything is still in the thread.
Settings
Open the settings modal from the inbox toolbar.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Accept support messages | Turn the inbox off entirely. Unrecognised messages go back to getting "I can't understand your command". |
| How should I notify you? | Telegram DM (the default) or None. With None you rely on the dashboard badge. |
| Display name on your replies | The name members see on your replies. Defaults to the project name. Max 60 characters. |
| Automatic acknowledgement | An immediate reply so a member knows they've been heard, e.g. "Thanks — we usually reply within a few hours." Max 1000 characters. Leave empty for none. |
| Also email me | Send an email alongside the Telegram DM. |
If you have no Telegram account linked to Subscriby, there is nowhere to send the DM. Support still works and messages still arrive in the dashboard — you just won't be pinged on Telegram. Link your account, or turn on Also email me.
The automatic acknowledgement is sent at most once an hour per conversation, so a member writing several times in a row does not get spammed by it.
Canned replies
For the questions you answer constantly, save the answer once. Open Canned replies from the inbox toolbar and add a title, the reply text, and an optional shortcut.
In the composer, canned replies are one click away — pick one, edit it if you need to, and send.
Assignment, internal notes and blocking
- Assign a thread to a teammate so it's clear who owns it. Assignment is advisory — it doesn't stop anyone else on the team from replying — and the Assigned to Me tab is what makes it useful. Clearing an assignment is allowed.
- Internal notes are recorded on the thread but never delivered to the member. Use them to leave context for a teammate. They raise no webhook and don't appear anywhere the member can see.
- Blocking a contact stops their messages from arriving at all. Their history stays; new messages are dropped, they can't reopen a resolved thread, and they get no indication they've been blocked.
When a reply doesn't arrive
A reply can fail to reach a member, and the thread tells you which:
- Unreachable — the member has blocked your bot. The reply is stored but will never arrive, and retrying won't help. There is no way to message someone who has blocked the bot; you'd need to reach them another way.
- Failed — something else went wrong. Subscriby retries automatically before marking it failed.
Automating it
Every part of this is reachable from outside the dashboard:
- Webhooks — six
support.*events, so member questions can page an on-call rota or open a ticket in your own helpdesk. Message bodies are deliberately kept out of webhook payloads; fetch them over the API. - REST API — list, read, reply, assign and resolve.
- MCP tools — let an AI assistant triage the queue and draft replies for you to approve.
- Zapier and n8n — the same operations as prebuilt steps.
Frequently asked
Related
- Contacting support — what your members see
- Managing Members
support.*webhook events- Support Conversations API
How is this guide?