Front Drafts & Shared Drafts Explained (Collaborative Replies)

Personal drafts vs shared drafts: the core distinction

Every reply you start in Front begins life as a personal draft — visible only to you, auto-saved as you type, and waiting in your Drafts folder until you send or discard it. That much matches any email client. What makes Front different is that a draft does not have to stay private.

A shared draft is a reply-in-progress that other teammates can see, comment on, and edit. Front actually creates shared drafts two ways. If you compose a reply inside a shared inbox or a shared conversation, the draft is automatically visible to everyone with access to that inbox — no button required. And if you start a personal draft in your own inbox, you can deliberately hand it off by clicking Share draft. Per Front's help center, your Drafts folder even labels the two states differently: a "Draft" tag for your personal drafts and a "Shared draft" tag for ones explicitly shared with you (help.front.com).

This is worth pausing on, because it is genuinely a Front-shaped idea. In a classic ticketing tool, a reply is a private textarea until you hit send; collaboration happens after the fact, through internal notes or reassignment. Front inverts that — collaboration happens before the send, on the draft itself. If you are new to how Front's model differs from a ticket queue, our explainer on what Front actually is and the deeper dive on the Front shared inbox set the stage for why shared drafts feel native here and foreign elsewhere.

How to share a personal draft for review

Say you have written a delicate reply — a refund decision, a security disclosure, a big-deal sales follow-up — and you want a second pair of eyes before it goes out. Here is the flow, straight from Front's documentation.

1. Compose your reply as normal — either a new message or a reply in an existing thread. It starts as a personal draft, auto-saving as you write.
2. Click "Share draft" at the top of the composer window.
3. Select the teammates who need access. You can add an optional comment in the same step to tell them what you need — "can you sanity-check the tone here?" or "approve before I send?"
4. Click "Add." Front notifies the teammates you picked, and the draft now lives as a shared draft they can open, read, and edit.

Once a draft is shared, the whole conversation becomes a workspace. You can @mention a specific teammate in a comment to pull them in — Front notifies them and the conversation surfaces in their Subscribed section — and you can hold an actual back-and-forth discussion in comments about the draft without any of it ever touching the customer-facing reply. Front's own launch post frames the three canonical use cases plainly: ask a teammate for feedback, give a hand to a colleague stuck on a tough email, or have your boss check the reply before it ships (front.com).

Co-editing in real time — and who holds the pen

Sharing a draft is only half of it. The part that surprises people coming from email is that Front lets teammates co-edit the same draft, and you watch the changes land as they happen.

• Real-time edits. As a teammate types into a shared draft, you see their changes appear live on your screen — the same collaborative-cursor experience you would expect from a shared document, applied to an email reply.
• One editor at a time. Front deliberately allows only one teammate to edit a draft at any given moment. This avoids the two-people-overwriting-each-other problem that plain shared textareas suffer from.
• The gray banner. When someone else is editing, a gray banner shows who is currently in the draft and when they last made a change — so you always know whether it is safe to jump in.
• "Take over." If you need to make the edit yourself, you click Take over on that banner. Front asks you to confirm, then hands you the pen and locks the other person out until they take it back.

That single-editor-with-handoff model is the quiet engineering choice that makes shared drafts trustworthy. Everyone sees the same live version, nobody clobbers anybody's words, and the "who is editing right now" question always has a visible answer.

The approval workflow, without a formal "approval" feature

It is worth being precise here: Front does not ship a rigid, gated "approval workflow" with an Approve/Reject button and an audit trail. What it ships is the raw material for one — shared drafts plus comments plus @mentions — that teams assemble into their own review habit. In practice that looks like:

1. An agent composes the reply and clicks Share draft, adding the reviewer.
2. The agent @mentions their lead in a comment: "ready for review — ok to send?"
3. The reviewer reads it, either edits directly (via Take over) or leaves comments requesting changes.
4. When the reviewer is happy, they reply in the comment thread — "looks good, send it" — and the agent (or the reviewer) hits send.

For support teams onboarding new agents, this is a soft quality gate: junior teammates share every customer-facing reply for a week or two, and the lead approves in-thread. For sales, it is deal-desk review on a high-stakes quote. For ops, it is a second signature on a policy-sensitive email. Pair shared drafts with Front rules to auto-route the right conversations to the right reviewer, and Front tags to mark which threads still need sign-off, and the informal workflow starts to feel structured without any custom tooling.

The honest limits — and where an AI layer picks up

Shared drafts are one of the genuinely differentiated things Front does. It is fair to say there is no clean ticketing equivalent: the pre-send, real-time, collaborative reply is a shared-inbox idea, and most help-desk tools simply don't have it. Credit where it is due.

But be clear-eyed about the edges. First, it is collaboration, not automation — a shared draft coordinates humans around a reply; it never writes the reply. Someone still stares at a blank composer and produces the first version. Second, the approval flow is convention, not enforcement: because there is no hard Approve/Reject gate, nothing technically stops an agent from sending an unreviewed reply — the discipline lives in your team's habits, not in a lock. Third, at scale, review is a throughput tax: every draft that needs a second pair of eyes waits on a human reviewer's attention, and that queue grows with volume.

This is exactly the seam where an AI agent layer fits — and it is worth weighing the build-versus-buy tradeoff before you reach for one. The broader category of AI agents for customer service exists to do the reasoning-and-drafting work that a shared draft assumes a human will do. Macha is one such layer, and the Macha–Front integration is live: it runs on top of the Front you already use — it does not replace Front, your shared inboxes, or your drafts. Connected to a Front conversation, Macha can read the thread, ground itself in your knowledge base, and draft a first reply directly into the conversation, so your team's job shifts from writing from scratch to reviewing, editing via Take over, and approving — the parts Front's shared drafts are genuinely good at. Because Macha's credits are consumed per AI action — a draft, a lookup, a reply — and not per resolution, you can meter it against the volume you actually want assisted; the pricing page has the full breakdown.

The clean division of labour: let Front own the collaborative, human-in-the-loop review of a reply, and let an AI layer own the blank-page first draft that review depends on. One coordinates people; the other removes the cold start.

FAQ

What is the difference between a draft and a shared draft in Front? A draft is personal — visible only to you and stored in your Drafts folder. A shared draft is visible to teammates, who can comment on it and co-edit it before it is sent. Drafts inside a shared inbox are shared automatically; a personal draft becomes shared when you click Share draft and pick teammates.

How do I share a draft in Front? Compose your reply, click Share draft at the top of the composer, select the teammates who need access (adding an optional comment), and click Add. Front notifies them and the draft becomes collaborative. This flow is documented in Front's help center.

Can two people edit the same Front draft at once? Teammates see edits in real time, but only one person can edit at a time. A gray banner shows who is currently editing and when they last changed the draft; click Take over (and confirm) to become the active editor.

Does Front have a formal approval workflow for replies? Not a gated one with an Approve/Reject button. Front provides the building blocks — shared drafts, comments, and @mentions — that teams use to run an informal review-and-approve process in-thread. Enforcement is a matter of team habit, not a hard lock.

Can I use AI to draft Front replies without replacing Front? Yes. An AI layer like Macha connects to Front as a native integration and drafts a grounded first reply into the conversation, leaving your team to review, edit, and approve using Front's own shared-draft and comment features. It runs on top of Front rather than replacing it.

Want your team reviewing and approving instead of writing from a blank composer? Start a free trial of Macha and connect it to your Front in minutes.