Messaging clients

Messages is one thread per person, not one per booking. Everything a client has ever asked you, across every request they have made, sits in a single conversation in date order. You never have to remember which project a question belonged to before you can answer it.

Where a client has more than one project with you, the thread draws a quiet divider when a new one starts, so you can still see where the conversation moved on. Your reply goes to their most recent request.

You cannot start a conversation from here, and that is deliberate. A client appears in your list the moment they book or reply, so the list is only ever people who are actually talking to you.

The search box above the list matches on name and email, so half a name is usually enough. Unread conversations float to the top on their own, and the tabs across the top narrow the list to All, Sent, Starred or Archived.

Open a conversation and the same idea applies inside it: search the thread itself, and Maelo highlights every match and lets you step through them one by one. Useful when you need the address or the reference someone sent three months ago.

The menu on a conversation lets you tidy it up. On a phone, press and hold a row in the list for the same options.

• •Pin Conversation lifts someone to a row of circles above the list.
• •Add to Starred files them under the star tab.
• •Mute Notifications stops a chatty thread pinging you.
• •Archive Conversation gets it out of the way without deleting anything.

Type in the box at the bottom and tap Send. Your client sees it in their hub straight away, and Maelo emails them a nudge so they know to look.

Hovering one of your own messages gives you a pencil and a bin. Edited messages carry a small (edited) mark so nobody is gaslit about what you said. Deleting removes it for both of you, though it cannot pull back an email that already went out.

There is also a wizard button beside the composer. Right now it offers Rescheduling, which takes you straight into offering that client new times for a session without leaving the thread. See rescheduling for how that plays out.

Use Attach images for stencils, references and healed shots. You can send up to five images in one message, each up to 10MB, and anything that is not an image is turned away. Maelo shrinks them on your device before sending, so a full resolution phone photo does not cost your client a minute of loading.

Whatever you type alongside them becomes the caption. Send images with no words and the conversation list simply shows a photo marker rather than an empty line.

A photo in a chat stays in the chat. If a client sends a reference you want filed with the booking, use Add to Request on the image and pick the request. It joins that project's reference images, where you will find it next to the brief instead of buried in the conversation.

A conversation with something new in it carries a soft blue dot, and the same dot sits on Messages in your sidebar so you can see there is something waiting from anywhere in the app. Opening the conversation clears both, across every request that person has with you.

Read something you cannot deal with right now? Mark as Unread in the conversation menu puts the dot straight back, so it is still on your list tonight.

Under your own messages, one tick means it is still sending, two grey ticks mean it arrived, and two green ticks mean your client has opened it. That only runs one way: clients never find out whether you have read theirs.

Your client reads and replies in their Client Hub, not in their email app. The email is just the nudge: it says there is a new message from you and gives them a View Message button that takes them to the thread.

Those nudges are throttled. Fire off four quick replies in a row and they get one email, not four. So write the way you actually talk, in short messages, without worrying about spamming anyone.

The wording and subject line of that email are yours to change under Settings, Notifications, alongside the rest of the emails Maelo sends on your behalf.