Triage

The Triage tab in the Inbox answers a single question: who needs something from me right now?

The rest of the inbox is organised around conversations. Triage is organised around work. A lead appears here because something about it is outstanding: they wrote and nobody answered, a date you set has arrived, a deal has gone silent. It disappears the moment that is no longer true. An empty triage queue means you are genuinely caught up, not that nothing happened.

What lands in the queue

Every open lead is checked against six signals. A lead matches one bucket at a time. If several apply, the most urgent wins, and that same order is the order the queue is presented in.

Badge	What it means	When it appears
Needs reply	They messaged you and nobody has answered.	Their message is the newest on the thread.
Wake-up due	A lead you parked is due to come back.	The lead is On hold and its revisit date has arrived.
Due catch-up	A date you set for reaching out has arrived.	The lead's catch-up date is in the past.
Task due	A task you wrote on the lead is overdue.	An open task's due date has passed.
Stalled	An active deal has gone quiet during evaluation.	In Discovery or Proposal with no activity for 10 days.
Gone quiet	Outreach that got no answer.	In sequence, In conversation or Meeting booked, the ball is with them, and no activity for 7 days.

The order is deliberate. People waiting on you come before dates you set for yourself. Dates you set come before your own to-do list, because a catch-up runs on someone else's clock while a note to yourself can slip a day. Silence comes last, because nobody is waiting on the other end of it.

Needs reply is not limited by stage. An unanswered message is owed a reply wherever the deal sits: a lead who replied mid-sequence is in the queue just like one in Proposal.

What is never in the queue

Won and Lost leads. A closed deal is not work.
Leads whose campaign has been deleted. Otherwise a campaign you removed would keep generating work forever.
Leads with a future catch-up date. Setting a date is you saying "not yet", and it suppresses every silence signal until that date arrives.

The count on the Triage tab is always the whole queue. Searching narrows the list below it, not the number, so the badge keeps meaning "everything waiting on you" even while you are looking at one name.

Working the queue

Select a lead and the action bar sits above the composer, showing which signal put it there and the ways to resolve it.

Reply. The most common resolution, and it needs no extra step. Sending a message takes the lead out of the queue and clears any catch-up date that was due, because messaging them is the catch-up happening. You stay on the thread after sending, with the badge switched to Waiting, so you can see the outcome of what you just did.

Snooze / Catch up. Pick when the lead should come back: tomorrow, in three days, next Monday, a week, two weeks, a month, or a specific date and time. The lead leaves the queue and returns as a Due catch-up on that date. The action is called Catch up on a lead that has gone quiet or stalled, where you are scheduling the next reach-out, and Snooze everywhere else, where you are delaying a date that is already due. Both do the same thing.

Move the stage. For when a conversation has actually changed the deal. Some moves carry a consequence worth knowing:

Meeting booked, Discovery and Proposal set a check-in 7 days out automatically. The next action on a deal at these stages is a scheduled check-in, not an immediate reply, so the lead steps out of triage until then.
On hold requires a revisit date, which can run out to six months. Without one, On hold is indistinguishable from Lost. The date comes back as a Wake-up due.
Lost requires a reason, and stops any sequence still running on the lead.

Moved off-channel. For deals in evaluation that have continued somewhere else, such as a shared Slack or WhatsApp thread. It records where the conversation went and schedules a check-in, so silence in MailMoo stops reading as silence from the lead.

Snoozing and closing move you straight to the next lead in the queue, so a session is a run of decisions rather than a return trip to the sidebar each time.

Sorting and searching

The queue is newest first by default. The value of triage work decays: a reply from this morning is warm, one from last year is archaeology, and putting the archaeology on top buries the work worth doing. Switch to oldest first when you are deliberately clearing a backlog from the bottom.

Search filters the queue by lead, across every bucket and the whole queue rather than just the part currently loaded. Use it when you know who you are looking for and do not want to scroll to them.

What happens without you

Two things run on their own, so the queue reflects reality rather than only what someone has clicked.

Outreach that never became a conversation closes itself. When a sequence runs out of steps and the lead never replied, nothing happens immediately. The lead stays where it is and shows up as Gone quiet, because a finished sequence means you stopped talking, not that they are dead. Replies land late and connection requests get accepted weeks later. If the lead is still silent and untouched 30 days on, it closes as Lost, with the reason recording which kind of failure it was:

Reason	Means	Points at
No reply	The messages reached them and were ignored.	Your messaging.
Couldn't reach them	Nothing ever got through, no thread was ever opened.	Your targeting.

That distinction is the whole point of recording a reason: the two failures have different fixes, and a pile of losses with no reason on them tells you nothing.

Anything you have touched is left alone. A lead with a catch-up date on it, or one you have moved to another stage by hand, is never closed automatically. An explicit decision always beats the sweep.

So is anything we never actually sent. If a sequence finished but no message or invite ever went out against the lead, it stays open rather than closing as "Couldn't reach them". Nothing having been delivered is our problem to fix, not a verdict on the lead, and filing it as a loss would hide the gap instead of showing it.

Replies reopen deals. An inbound message moves the lead to In conversation and stops the sequence, so a late reply pulls the lead back into the queue as Needs reply rather than sitting unnoticed.

Triage shows the backlog you already had, it does not create it. A queue in the thousands the first time you open it is every unanswered reply and abandoned campaign becoming visible at once. Sort oldest first, close what is clearly dead in the CRM, and let the 30-day sweep take the rest.

Triage and the pipeline

Triage and the CRM pipeline are two views of the same records. The pipeline answers where does this deal stand. Triage answers what needs doing today. Stage is what connects them: it decides which silence signals apply, how long the lead is given before it counts as quiet, and whether it is eligible for the queue at all.

Which is the practical argument for keeping stages current. A lead parked in the wrong stage is measured against the wrong clock, and triage is only as good as the pipeline underneath it.