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A conversation in the Inbox is either Open or Done. That is the whole status list: there is no “closed”, no “pending”, no “snoozed”. Done means your team is finished with it for now, not that the contact can’t come back. Prefer to watch first? This walkthrough covers working the two statuses.
Nothing closes a conversation for going quiet. There is no auto-close after a silent period, no matter how long ago the last message was. What can close one without anybody clicking is an automation you built yourself: see What can mark one done.

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What each status means

Open

Needs a human, or is simply not finished. Every new conversation starts here, and any inbound message puts it back here.

Done

Your team has dealt with it. It leaves the Open folder and moves to Done. The contact is not blocked, notified, or changed in any way.
Marking done is a housekeeping signal for your team. It does not stop the bot, does not stop broadcasts, and does not archive or delete anything.

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What can mark one done

Four things, and two of them involve no person at all: All four run the same action, so everything under What marking done fires happens either way.
So when a conversation nobody touched turns up in Done, check your published flows for a Close conversation step before you go hunting for the teammate who closed it. A close with no teammate behind it isn’t credited to anyone, which is why it never shows up in Team performance’s Closed figures.

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Mark a conversation as done

1

Open the conversation

Select it from the list. The details panel is on the right, on a wide screen of roughly 1280px and up. Below that you get the list and thread panes only, and Mark as done is unavailable.
2

Select Mark as done

The button sits in the details panel. DMLY drops you back to the list with your folder and filters intact. That is deliberate, so you can work straight through a queue.
3

Answer the prompt, if you get one

If an automation is frozen mid-step because a human took the conversation over, DMLY asks What should happen to the paused automation? before it closes anything: resume it, skip the step it was waiting on, keep it paused, or end it. Cancel backs out and leaves the conversation open. With nothing paused there is no prompt. See Work a conversation as a team.
4

Reopen if you need to

Open the conversation again and select Reopen conversation. It flips back to open in place, without moving you out of the thread.

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What marking done fires

Marking a conversation done is not just a label; it is an event other parts of DMLY listen for:
  • The conversation.closed webhook is sent.
  • The Conversation closed automation trigger fires, so any flow built on that trigger starts for this contact: a follow-up ask, a satisfaction question, a tag.
Both fire only on the change from open to done. Marking an already-done conversation done again fires nothing, so you cannot double-trigger a follow-up by clicking twice. That same guard is what stops a loop when a flow built on Conversation closed ends with its own Close conversation step: the second close changes nothing, so it fires nothing.
The webhook and the trigger are named “closed” while the button says Mark as done. They are the same thing.
Reopen conversation fires nothing at all: no webhook, no trigger. Neither does an inbound message that reopens a conversation: reopening is not itself an event. The inbound message still fires message.received and any message-based automation, as it would on an open conversation.
Because closing a conversation is a trigger, “mark as done” can be the thing that sends your WhatsApp review request or feedback question. Build the flow once on the Conversation closed trigger and it runs every time a chat is finished, whether an agent did it or a flow did.

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A contact writing back reopens it

If a contact replies to a conversation you marked done, DMLY sets it back to Open and, if you had archived that thread, un-archives it. It reappears in your Open folder with the new message. This is why done is safe to use liberally. You are never hiding a customer who comes back; they surface again on their own. That is the default, and an admin can narrow it in Conversation settings: reopen only within a set number of hours of the conversation being closed, or leave it closed for good. The message is never lost either way. It is recorded in the thread, it raises the unread count, it still fires message.received and any automation built on it, and it still un-archives an archived thread. Only the flip back to Open is withheld, so a workspace that restricts reopening needs somebody watching All or Unread only rather than just the Open folder.

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Archive is a separate thing from done

Archive Conversation in the details panel is not a status. A conversation can be open or done and archived; archiving lives in its own Archive folder. Use Mark as done for day-to-day queue clearing, and Archive Conversation only for threads you genuinely want out of the way for good.
Archived conversations auto-delete after 30 days. The messages go permanently. If you only want a conversation out of your queue, mark it done instead; done keeps everything.
Unarchive Conversation brings it back at any point in those 30 days. Delete permanently removes the thread and its messages immediately and cannot be undone.

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One contact can be two conversations

A Contact is one CRM record, but the Inbox lists DMs and Comments as separate rows, and shows one kind at a time. Someone who both messages you and comments on a post has a row on each tab: one under DMs, one under Comments, never two rows in the same list. Archive and delete apply to the row you are looking at; archiving the DM leaves the comment thread untouched. Open and done work differently: they are set on the contact, so marking the DM done moves their comment row to Done as well.

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Working a queue down

1

Start in the Open folder

The folders across the top are All, Open, Done, and Archive. Open is your working queue.
2

Narrow to what's yours

Open the filter toggle (the funnel icon) for the assignee filter (Anyone / Unassigned / a teammate), Unread only, and the All channels picker. The always-visible platform row (All, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, SMS) narrows by platform; the channel picker lists your connected channels, which is how you reach the platforms that row doesn’t show. Above that row, the DMs / Comments toggle picks which kind of thread you’re working. It starts on DMs and has no All, so switch it over when you want the public replies.
3

Reply, then mark as done

By default replying assigns the conversation to you automatically, so Unassigned empties as your team works. When you’re finished, select Mark as done and you land back on the list, ready for the next one.
Opening a conversation marks it read straight away, which clears its unread badge and counts it down in the Unified Inbox badge in the sidebar.
The numbers on the folders are approximations, on purpose. They count contacts, while the list shows threads (a contact can have both a DM and a comment thread), so a busy workspace can see a small mismatch. The list itself is always correct.
The Inbox shows the 100 most recently active conversations in the current folder and filter, with no pagination. If you’re not finding an older conversation, narrow the filters or use Search conversations rather than scrolling.
That’s an inbound message doing it: a contact replied. If it keeps happening on a chat you’re finished with, check whether a bot is answering into it; you can stop that with Pause bot (human takeover) in the details panel. See Assign chats to your team.If it is happening across the whole workspace and your team treats done as resolved, an admin can restrict or switch off reopening in Conversation settings.

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Next

Assign chats to your team

Who owns a conversation, and how replying changes it.

Inbox notifications

What gets you and your team alerted.

Conversation settings

Control when a closed conversation reopens, and what a reply does to the bot.