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Assignment marks who owns a conversation. It is a label your team agrees to respect — not a lock. Three things surprise people, so read them first:
  • Assignment belongs to the contact, not the thread. Assigning one conversation assigns every thread that contact has — DMs and comments, on every channel. One contact has one owner.
  • Assignment does not hide anything. Everyone who can open the Inbox still sees every conversation, assigned or not. It changes a filter, a notification and a webhook — nothing else.
  • Replying takes the conversation. Whenever a teammate sends a reply, the conversation is reassigned to them automatically, even if it was already assigned to someone else. The conversation follows whoever answered it last.

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Assign a conversation

1

Open the conversation

Select it in the Inbox list. The details panel opens on the right.
2

Pick a teammate in Assigned to

Use the Assigned to dropdown and choose a member of your workspace. Choose Unassigned to hand it back to the pool.
Only workspace members appear in the list, and only a real workspace member can be assigned.
Assigning is silent when nothing really changes. Picking the person who is already assigned, or unassigning, sends no notification and fires no webhook.

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What assignment actually does

When you assign a conversation to someone new:
  • They get an in-app bell notification that links straight to the thread. See Notifications.
  • DMLY sends a conversation.assigned webhook, if you use them. See Webhooks.
  • The conversation now matches that person in the assignee filter.
That is the whole list. Assignment grants no extra access, removes no access, and does not change what the contact sees.
When a teammate replies to a conversation assigned to someone else, the assignment moves to them with no notification to the previous assignee. If ownership matters to you, agree a rule that people only reply in their own filter.

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How a team divides the work

The practical pattern is a filter, not a rule engine.
1

Everyone works their own queue

Open the filters and set the assignee filter to your own name. That is your list for the day.
2

Someone triages Unassigned

Set the assignee filter to Unassigned to see everything nobody has picked up, and assign each one out.
3

Close what's finished

Use Mark as done so the conversation leaves the Open folder. Nothing closes by itself, and any new message from the contact reopens it. See Conversation status.
Set the filter to Anyone to go back to the full list.
Use Internal notes to hand context over with the conversation — notes are team-only, and mentioning a teammate in a note notifies them.

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Assign automatically

There is no routing rule in the Inbox itself. Automatic assignment comes from Automations:

Assign in a flow

An Assign node or a human-handover node sets the owner as part of a flow.

Round-robin with AI

The AI agent can share chats out round-robin — the teammate with the fewest conversations currently assigned wins.
Assignment from a flow, from the AI agent, or from a reply does not fire conversation.assigned and does not send the assignee a bell notification — only assigning by hand from the details panel does. When a flow hands a conversation to a human, DMLY drops a note into the thread so the agent can see why it landed with them. By default the node also pauses the bot (Pause bot replies) and tells the contact someone will be with them shortly — both are editable on the node. Take over manually with Pause bot (human takeover) in the details panel.

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The “On call duty” toggle is not an inbox setting

On call duty / Off duty in the sidebar controls WhatsApp voice calls only — it decides whether inbound WhatsApp calls ring you. It has no effect on chat assignment or routing, and it only appears when a WhatsApp channel has calling enabled. See WhatsApp calling.
DMLY has no availability or on-call setting for chat. An away teammate still receives assignments; move their conversations by hand.
The whole Inbox can be hidden from a role. Check the member’s role under Roles and permissions — the same settings also mask contact phone numbers and email addresses in the conversation panel.