Front Snooze & Reminders Explained

What snooze actually does

Snoozing a conversation temporarily removes it from your Open inbox and files it under a Snoozed tab until a time you pick, at which point it reappears in your Open tab as if it just arrived. Nothing is lost, nothing is closed — the clock simply pauses the conversation and un-pauses it on schedule. That makes snooze the right tool whenever the next useful action lives in the future: a customer promised to send a screenshot tomorrow, a refund clears in three days, a renewal conversation should resume next week.

This matters more in a shared inbox than in a personal one. In Front, a team inbox is worked by several people at once, so an open conversation is a signal to the whole group that something still needs doing. Snoozing it clears that signal until the follow-up is genuinely actionable, which keeps the shared Open queue honest — everything you see there is something to act on now, not a pile of "waiting on the customer" threads nobody can triage. If you're new to how Front differs from a ticketing tool, our what is Front primer sets the context.

The three ways to snooze a conversation

Front gives you three entry points into the same snooze menu, per its help documentation:

1. The clock icon at the top of an open conversation. This is the direct way — open a thread, click the clock, pick a time.
2. The quick action in your conversation list. Hover over a conversation in the list (without opening it) and a snooze control appears, so you can snooze several threads in a row without reading each one.
3. The Send & snooze button in the composer, which snoozes the conversation as part of sending a reply — more on that below.

Whichever entry point you use, the menu that opens offers the same preset times plus a custom option.

Snooze-until: presets and custom times

The snooze menu leads with a handful of relative presets — Later today, Tomorrow, This week, and Next week — each of which resolves to a concrete moment (Later today might land at 10:00 PM, for instance). These cover the everyday follow-up rhythm without making you think about calendars.

When a preset doesn't fit, choose Day & Time at the bottom of the menu to snooze until an exact date and time you enter — the "snooze-until" case, for the customer call scheduled for the 14th at 9am or the trial that expires at month-end.

If you find yourself reaching for the same custom timing over and over, Front lets you save your own. Click the gear icon, go to your personal settings, and select Snoozes, where you can build up to 34 custom snooze times that then appear in the menu alongside the defaults. Because these live in personal settings, each teammate curates their own list — a support agent's "start of next shift" and a salesperson's "end of quarter" can coexist without stepping on each other.

Send & Snooze vs Send & Archive

The two composer buttons look similar and do very different things. This is the distinction most worth getting right, because picking the wrong one is how follow-ups quietly fall through.

Send & Archive means "I've replied and I'm done unless they write back." Per Front's composer documentation, clicking it replies and archives the conversation, closing it out of your Open inbox. It does not set a reminder. If the recipient replies, the conversation automatically reopens in your inbox; if they never reply, it stays archived and you never think about it again. This is the correct choice for a resolved issue — you answered the question, the ball is in their court, and no news is fine.

Send & Snooze means "I've replied, but I need to hear back — remind me if I don't." It sends your reply and snoozes the conversation until a time you choose. If the customer responds before then, the snooze auto-cancels and the reply surfaces immediately (the normal behaviour). But if they go quiet, the conversation reopens at your chosen time as a prompt to chase. This is the choice for anything where silence is a problem: a quote awaiting approval, a bug fix awaiting confirmation, a renewal awaiting a signature.

The mental model: Archive trusts the customer to come back; Snooze trusts you to come back.

How snoozed conversations re-surface

The re-surfacing behaviour is where snooze earns its keep, so it's worth being precise.

When you snooze, the conversation leaves your Open tab and moves to a Snoozed tab. You can see everything currently snoozed by selecting that tab in the conversation list (available under the Later, tag, and shared-inbox sections of your sidebar), or by searching with the is:snoozed condition. So a snoozed conversation is never truly hidden — it's filed, and you can pull the whole waiting-list up on demand.

At the snooze time, the conversation reappears in your Open tab exactly as if a new message had arrived, back at the top of the queue where you'll see it. In a shared inbox, it reappears for whoever owns it — which is why snooze and assignment work hand in hand: an assigned, snoozed conversation comes back to the assignee, not the whole team.

There's one graceful exception. If the customer replies before your snooze expires, Front cancels the snooze automatically and reopens the conversation right away — because the whole point of the reminder was to catch their silence, and they've broken it. If you still want to defer (say they replied "will confirm Monday"), you can re-snooze in one click with Snooze again until…, which reuses your previous timing.

Automating snooze with rules

Snooze isn't only a manual action. Front's rules engine can snooze conversations automatically as part of a workflow — for example, snoozing an auto-reply confirmation for a few hours so it doesn't clutter the queue, or snoozing low-priority inbound until business hours. Rules can also react to snooze state as a condition, letting you build follow-up logic that fires when a conversation re-surfaces. For high-volume teams this turns snooze from a personal habit into a team-wide routing behaviour.

The honest limits — and where an AI layer helps

Front's snooze is well-designed: three entry points, sensible presets, exact-time control, custom timings, automatic cancellation, and clean re-surfacing. For a human working an inbox, it's about as good as manual follow-up gets. But notice what it is — and isn't.

Snooze is a reminder, not an action. It brings a conversation back to your inbox at the right moment; it does not do the follow-up. When a Send & Snooze reminder fires three days later, a person still has to re-read the thread, remember the context, check whether the promised thing happened, and write the chase. Multiply that across a busy shared inbox and "follow up on everything I snoozed" becomes its own quiet backlog.

It's also entirely manual and per-conversation unless you wire up rules. Front will faithfully snooze exactly what you tell it to and nothing more — it won't decide, on its own, that a given thread warrants a two-day nudge versus an immediate close. And the re-surfaced conversation lands as a blank prompt: Front reopens the thread, but it doesn't summarise what changed or draft the next reply.

This is the seam where an AI agent layer fits, and it's worth thinking through the tradeoff honestly rather than reaching for automation everywhere. Macha is an AI agent layer that runs on top of the Front you already use — the Macha–Front connector is live — and it does not replace Front or its snooze feature. You connect Macha to Front and it reads and writes the same conversations your inbox already handles: it can pick up a re-surfaced follow-up, check an order or account status through a custom tool that turns a REST API into something the agent can call, and draft or send a grounded reply — so the routine chases you'd otherwise snooze-and-remember happen without a person in the loop. Credits are consumed per AI action, not per resolution, which the pricing page lays out.

The clean division of labour: keep Front's snooze as your reliable, deterministic reminder system for when a conversation should come back, and layer an agent on top for the part the reminder can't do — actually handling the follow-up when it does.

FAQ

What are the ways to snooze a conversation in Front? Three. Click the clock icon at the top of an open conversation, use the quick action that appears when you hover over a conversation in the list, or use Send & snooze in the composer to snooze as you reply. All three open the same menu of preset and custom times.

What's the difference between Send & Snooze and Send & Archive? Send & Archive replies and closes the conversation with no reminder — it reopens only if the customer writes back. Send & Snooze replies and sets a follow-up reminder — the conversation reopens at your chosen time if the customer doesn't reply, so you remember to chase. Archive trusts the customer to return; snooze reminds you to.

Where do snoozed conversations go, and how do they come back? They move to the Snoozed tab (also findable with the is:snoozed search) and reappear in your Open tab at the exact date and time you set. If the customer replies before then, Front cancels the snooze automatically and reopens the conversation right away.

Can I create my own snooze times? Yes. Click the gear icon, open your personal settings, and select Snoozes, where you can create up to 34 custom snooze times that appear in the menu alongside the defaults. They're per-teammate, so everyone curates their own.

Can I add AI to Front's follow-ups without replacing Front? Yes. An AI agent layer like Macha connects to Front as a native connector and runs on top of your existing inbox and its snooze feature — it doesn't replace them. It can act on a re-surfaced conversation, look up status through a custom tool, and draft or send a grounded reply, while Front stays the system of record for your conversations and reminders.

Ready to turn snoozed follow-ups into handled ones? Start a free trial of Macha and connect it to your Front inbox in minutes.