Front Comments & @Mentions Explained (Internal Discussion)

Comments vs. replies: the one distinction that matters

Every conversation in Front has two composers, and confusing them is the single most expensive mistake a new user can make. A reply is an outbound message — it leaves Front and lands in your customer's inbox. A comment is an internal note — per Front's Understanding comments documentation, "only your team can see posted comments, so you can discuss the conversation amongst yourselves without having to forward the message around." The customer never sees it. Ever.

Mechanically, you add one by clicking the Add internal comment field at the bottom of any conversation, typing your note, and pressing Enter to post. The comment thread interleaves with the message history so the whole team sees the reply and the reasoning behind it in one place. This collision of "what we said to the customer" and "what we said to each other" in a single view is one of the things that makes Front genuinely different from a ticketing tool — the internal discussion isn't buried in a separate notes tab, it's inline. If you're new to the platform, our what is Front primer covers how this fits the wider shared-inbox model, and Front's shared inbox explained goes deeper on visibility.

In a shared inbox, comments are visible to anyone with access to that inbox. In an individual inbox they're visible only to you — until you @mention a teammate or delegate access, at which point that person can see the conversation too.

The comment composer, briefly

The comment bar carries its own small toolbar, and knowing what's there saves you a lot of clicking. Alongside the @ button for mentions, you get a plus (+) icon for attaching files or scheduling a Zoom meeting, an emoji picker, a GIF button (Tenor), and an expand icon that opens a larger writing area for longer internal write-ups.

Two keyboard shortcuts are worth committing to muscle memory. Cmd/Ctrl + period (.) expands or collapses the comment box, and pressing the up arrow while your cursor is in an empty comment composer pulls your last comment back up to edit it — handy for fixing a typo before a teammate has even read it.

How @mentions work — and where they route conversations

An @mention is how you turn a comment from a note into a summons. Inside the comment bar, type @ (or click the @ button) and start typing a teammate's name, and Front surfaces a picker of people you can loop in. Per Front's How to use @mentions in comments and emails documentation, the mentioned teammate is "notified according to their notification settings" and — this is the important part — the conversation appears in their Mentions and Subscribed sections.

That routing is the whole point. Front's Subscribed section, described in Understanding your Subscribed section, collects the conversations, tasks, and discussions where you're a participant but not the assignee — so an @mention is effectively a way of saying "you don't own this, but you need to know about it." The mentioned person keeps seeing it in Subscribed whenever there's new activity, without ever being made the assignee.

A few behaviours worth knowing:

• @all mentions everyone — but scoped to the inbox. In a shared inbox, @all notifies every teammate with access to that inbox where the conversation lives, not your entire company.
• Custom group mentions let you set up shortcuts like @managers or @billing via rules, so one mention pings a defined group instead of naming people one at a time.
• Granting access on mention. If you @mention a teammate who doesn't have access to the workspace or inbox, Front will (after a confirmation) grant them access to that specific conversation — so a mention can pull in someone from another team without a full permissions change.

One caveat the screenshot above underlines: the @mention picker in the comment composer lists teammates, and everything stays internal. There's a separate @mention behaviour in the email composer that adds a contact as a recipient — so always check which composer you're typing in before you hit send.

Internal discussions: when there's no customer to reply to

Comments live on a customer conversation. But sometimes the thing you need to talk about has no external message at all — "who's covering the Monday queue?" or "planning for the offsite." For that, Front has a distinct object: the internal discussion.

Per How to start an internal discussion, you click the plus (+) icon in your sidebar and select Discussion, choose the teammates or a shared inbox in the To field, add a subject, and send. The discussion then shows up in the Discussions and Subscribed sections of every participant's sidebar. Think of it as a lightweight, threaded internal channel that lives in the same tool as your customer work — no context-switching to Slack for a quick coordination question. Both comments and internal discussions are, per Front's docs, available on all plans.

Here's the clean way to hold the three concepts apart:

The honest limits — and where an AI layer picks up

Front's comments are one of the best-executed collaboration primitives in any inbox tool, and they're not the thing that breaks down. But collaboration has a cost, and it's worth naming it. A comment is only as good as the teammate who reads it: an @mention still routes a question to a human who has to stop what they're doing, read the thread, go look something up, and answer. On a busy shared inbox, "let me @mention Sam" is often a polite way of adding latency — the customer waits while an internal ping bounces around.

Comments also don't know anything. When a teammate posts "what's the status of order #4471?" as a comment, Front faithfully delivers that question to whoever's mentioned, but it can't answer it — the data lives in Shopify or your ERP, and a person has to go fetch it. And @mentions can quietly become noise: a heavily-mentioned senior teammate ends up with a Subscribed section that's impossible to keep up with, which is the collaboration equivalent of an overflowing cc line.

This is the seam where an AI agent layer fits — not by replacing comments, but by answering the questions that would otherwise become one. The broader category of AI agents for customer service exists precisely to do the reasoning-and-lookup work a comment can only ask for. Macha is one such layer: it runs on top of the Front you already use as a native connector — the Macha↔Front integration is live — and it does not replace Front, its inbox, or its comment threads. Once you connect Front to Macha, an agent can read an incoming conversation, look up that order status through a custom tool that turns your REST API into something it can call, and post the answer back as a grounded internal comment or a drafted reply — so the human who would have been @mentioned gets the answer instead of the question. It also pairs naturally with the automation you may already run through Front rules and tags: rules route and label, the agent reasons and answers.

The division of labour stays clean: keep Front's comments, @mentions, and discussions as the human collaboration layer — they're excellent at it — and let an agent absorb the lookup-and-draft work so a mention becomes the exception, not the reflex. (Macha's credits are consumed per AI action, not per resolution — see the pricing breakdown.)

FAQ

Can the customer see Front comments? No. Comments are strictly internal — per Front's documentation, only your team can see posted comments, and they're never sent to the customer. They sit inline on the conversation for your teammates to read, separate from the customer-facing reply.

What's the difference between a comment and a reply in Front? A reply is an outbound message that leaves Front and reaches the customer. A comment is an internal note visible only to teammates with access to the inbox. Both appear in the same conversation view, but only the reply is sent externally.

Where do @mentioned conversations show up? When you @mention a teammate in a comment, the conversation appears in that person's Mentions and Subscribed sections, and they're notified per their notification settings. The Subscribed section collects conversations where they're a participant but not the assignee.

What does @all do? @all mentions everyone, scoped to the inbox. In a shared inbox it notifies every teammate with access to the inbox where the conversation lives — not your whole company. You can also create custom group mentions (like @managers) via rules.

Is there a plan requirement for comments or discussions? No. Per Front's help center, comments, @mentions, and internal discussions are available on all plans. Confirm current behaviour against your own Front plan, as vendors update packaging over time.

Want the questions your team @mentions each other about answered before anyone has to read the thread? Start a free trial of Macha and connect it to your Front in minutes.