Team Chat

Team chat is Owlat's built-in, Slack-style messaging surface for your team. It lives next to the Team Inbox so the people handling customer email can talk to each other in the same app — and even pin a customer conversation inside a channel to discuss it together. Chat lives at Dashboard → Chat (/dashboard/chat).

Any team member can take part in chat. Renaming, archiving, managing members, and linking email threads are reserved for room admins (and for owners/admins, who can govern any room). See Channel members and roles.

Channels

A channel is a named room for a topic, team, or project. Channels come in two flavors:

Channel names are unique across the workspace (case-insensitive), capped at 80 characters, and an optional description can be up to 280 characters.

Create a channel

From the chat sidebar, click New channel. Give it a name, an optional description, and choose public or private. You can also add a few teammates as initial members while creating it. Whoever creates the channel becomes its first admin; any initial members you add join as plain members.

Browse and join

Click Browse channels to see every public channel in the workspace and join the ones you want. You can also open a public channel without joining — you'll see its history in a read-only preview with a Join to send messages banner at the top. Click Join to start posting. Private channels never show up in browse; you only reach them by being invited.

Archive a channel

A room admin can archive a channel. Archived channels drop out of the sidebar and the browse list, and no one can post to them, but their history is preserved. An admin can unarchive a channel later to bring it back.

Direct messages

A direct message (DM) is a private conversation between you and one or more teammates — 1:1 or a small group.

• Start one with New DM in the sidebar and pick the people to include.
• DMs are deduplicated by their participant set: starting a DM with the same people always reopens the existing conversation rather than creating a duplicate.
• The sidebar labels a 1:1 DM with the other person's name; a group DM shows the first few names plus a "+N more" suffix.

Sending, editing and deleting messages

Type in the composer at the bottom of a room and press Enter to send; Shift+Enter inserts a newline. Messages are plain text (up to 8,000 characters) and @-mentions are highlighted inline. You must be a member of the room to post — opening a public channel as a non-member shows the preview banner instead of a composer.

• Edit — hover your own message and click the pencil. Only the author can edit a message; edited messages are marked edited.
• Delete — hover and click the trash icon. You can delete your own messages; a room admin (or an owner/admin) can delete anyone's. Deletes are soft: the message is replaced with "this message was deleted" rather than removed outright.

Read tracking and unread badges

Owlat tracks how far you've read in each room. When you're viewing a room, it's marked read automatically as new messages arrive. The sidebar shows an unread count per room for messages you haven't seen (your own messages and deleted messages don't count). Very busy rooms are shown as 100+ rather than an exact number.

Mentions

Type @ in the composer to bring up a picker of teammates; choosing one inserts a handle like @alice.smith. Handles resolve against each person's email local-part or their slugified name.

• A resolved mention notifies that person only if they're a member of the room — mentioning a non-member in a private channel or DM is silently dropped, so a message preview never leaks to someone without access.
• Mentioning yourself never notifies you.
• Your unread mentions feed a separate badge so a direct ping stands out from ordinary unread activity. Mentions are cleared as you read the room they were posted in.

Channel members and roles

Every room has a membership list with two per-room roles:

A few guardrails keep channels governable:

• A channel always keeps at least one admin — you can't leave, demote, or remove the last admin without handing the role to someone else first.
• Owners and admins of the workspace hold the chat:manage permission, which lets them administer any channel (and delete any message) even if they aren't a per-room admin. This is the escape hatch for governing rooms they didn't create.

Open the members panel from the room header to see who's in a room and manage roles. Leaving a room is for channels only — DMs can't be left.

Attachments

Attach files to a message with the paperclip button, or paste an image directly into the composer. Each file is capped at 25 MiB. Uploaded files become first-class assets in your Media Library (tagged chat-attachment), so they're browsable there too. Attachment download links are gated on room access: only members of a private channel or DM can fetch the files posted in it.

Linking a channel to an inbox conversation

A channel can be linked to an inbox conversation thread so the whole team can discuss a customer email in context. This is the bridge between team chat and the Team Inbox.

Only channels can be linked — DMs cannot. A room admin can remove the link at any time from the same dialog.

Permissions at a glance

For how chat fits into the wider role model, see Team & Permissions.