What Messages does
Messages is a built-in chat tool for your workspace. It lets anyone in the workspace hold one-to-one conversations or group conversations with other people in the same workspace. Messages are stored per workspace, so a conversation in one workspace is completely separate from any other workspace you belong to.
You will find Messages at the /message page. The conversation list on the left shows every conversation you are part of, and selecting one opens the chat history on the right.
Direct messages
A direct message is a private one-to-one conversation between you and one other person in the workspace. To start one, open the new message flow and pick a person from your workspace. The people you can message are the active members of your current workspace. The list excludes yourself, so you cannot start a conversation with your own account.
Each direct conversation is grouped by the other person, so all the back-and-forth with a given person appears as a single thread regardless of who sent which message. Conversations are sorted with the most recent activity at the top.
Group messages
A group conversation lets several people in the workspace talk together in one thread. When you create a group you give it a name and choose the people to include. Your own account is always added to the group automatically, so you are a member of any group you create.
A group only appears in your conversation list if you are one of its members. Every message you send in the group is delivered to all of the group's members, and the thread shows who sent each message. If a group was not given a name, it is shown with a generic label based on the number of members.
Sender attribution
Every message records who sent it. When a conversation is displayed, each message is shown with the sender's name and their account profile image, if they have one set.
In the conversation list, the preview of the latest message indicates the sender. If you sent the most recent message, the preview attributes it to You. Otherwise it shows the other person's name (or, in a group, the name of whoever sent the last message).
File attachments
A message can carry either text or a file attachment. When you attach a file it is uploaded to secure storage for your workspace before the message is sent. Attachments can be up to 50 MB.
Supported attachment types include images (JPEG, PNG, WEBP, GIF), documents (PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, plain text, and CSV), archives (ZIP, RAR, 7z), and audio and video files (MP3, WAV, OGG, MP4, WEBM). A text message requires actual text content, and a file message requires the uploaded file, so empty messages cannot be sent.
Read tracking and unread counts
Messages track who has seen them. When you send a message, it is immediately marked as seen by you. When you open a conversation, the messages in it are marked as seen by you as well.
The conversation list shows an unread count for each conversation, which is the number of messages in that conversation you have not yet seen. Opening the conversation clears that count for you. Because read state is tracked per person, your unread count is independent of everyone else's.
Deleting a conversation
You can remove a direct conversation. This is a soft action: the underlying message history is not permanently erased. The messages are marked as deleted so they no longer appear in the conversation list.
Notifications: push and email
When you send a message, Deskie tries to notify the recipients so they know something is waiting, even if they do not have the app open. There are two channels.
Push notifications
Recipients receive a push notification in real time. For a direct message, the notification is titled with the sender's name. For a group message, it is titled with the sender's name and the group name. The notification body is a short preview: for a text message it is the start of the message text, and for a file message it reads as an attachment notice. Tapping the notification opens the Messages page. Push delivery reaches a recipient's active devices, including the mobile app and web push subscriptions registered for that workspace.
Email notifications
Recipients may also receive a short email letting them know they have a new message. The email is intentionally minimal: it does not include the contents of the message, only that a new message arrived. For a direct message the subject reads New message from the sender's name; for a group it reads New message in the group name. The email links the recipient straight to the Messages page for that workspace.
To avoid flooding people, the email is throttled to at most one message email per recipient per workspace in any 24-hour period. Once an email is sent, any further messages that arrive within the next 24 hours are not emailed again; they simply wait in the app. The throttle window is tracked separately for each workspace, so being active in two workspaces does not interfere with the other.
Notification preferences
Both push and email notifications for messages respect a single notification preference. By default a person is opted in, so they receive message notifications unless they turn them off. If someone turns message notifications off, they receive neither the push nor the email. People can manage this in their notification preferences. For more on how Deskie's notification settings work, see Notifications.
Who you can message
Messaging is scoped to your current workspace. You can only message active people who belong to the same workspace, and conversations and groups never cross workspace boundaries. For background on how workspaces define who is in your community, see Workspaces and locations and Managing members.