FAQ — I can’t find a conversation
You know the conversation exists — you saw it yesterday, replied to it, the customer mentioned it. Now it’s not in front of you. Here’s where to look.
Did you check the other tabs?
The conversation list has four tabs: Alia, Active, Snoozed, Done. The conversation might have moved.
- Snoozed — somebody (you or a teammate) snoozed it. It returns to Active when the snooze ends.
- Done — it was resolved. Customer reply will reopen it; otherwise it stays in Done.
- Alia — it’s being managed by an Agent Stack. Click into the Alia tab to see AI-handled conversations; depending on the Statuses picker, Alia can show Active, Done, or Archived Agent Stack conversations.
If you don’t know where to look, open the search panel from the conversation toolbar — it searches across tabs. Its Quick tab also takes operators such as status:, channel:, agent:, tag:, from: and subject:, which is often faster than guessing which tab a conversation landed in.
Was it merged into another conversation?
If the customer wrote in twice and someone merged the two conversations, the secondary conversation moved to Done with a “merged into” link. Open it from Done — the link points to the primary conversation, where all the messages now live.
See Merge conversations for how merging works.
Was it archived?
Archived conversations don’t appear in any of the four working tabs (Alia, Active, Snoozed, Done). Archive is the terminal state — Done conversations move there after the resolution timer elapses.
There is one exception: conversations completed by an Agent Stack can be found from Alia. Open the Alia tab and use the Statuses picker to choose Archived.
For non-stack archived conversations, archived conversations stay searchable. The most reliable way to find one is to open the customer’s contact in the CRM — every prior conversation, including archived ones, is listed there.
Is a filter applied?
Look at the filter chips above the list. If a saved filter is highlighted or filter chips are active, the list shows only the slice that matches.
- Click the active chip to clear it.
- Or switch back to the underlying tab to see everything in that tab.
This is the most common reason a conversation “disappears” — a saved filter is applied that doesn’t include it.
Is your scope correct?
Your role determines which conversations you see. If you only have access to one team’s queue and the conversation is now assigned to a different team, you won’t see it in your list.
- Check the assignment of the conversation if you can find it via search
- If your role doesn’t include cross-team visibility, ask a teammate or supervisor to check from their account
Did you search across the right text?
Search runs against the conversation subject, the human-readable conversation ID, the conversation’s UUID, the contact (name and any stored email or phone), message bodies, and internal comments. The length of your term decides how much of that it reaches: one or two characters search the subject and conversation ID only; three characters add the contact; message bodies and comments need at least 4 characters. If a short word from the message body doesn’t find the conversation, try a longer word or an exact phrase from the message instead. The same 4-character minimum applies when you use content-specific search or filter syntax.
Text in the Comments panel is searchable too, which is useful for serial numbers, case IDs, or other internal handoff context. New or edited comments become searchable right away; older comments may only appear after your workspace’s comment-search backfill has run.
If a supervisor used Show in English on a non-English evidence conversation, the conversation subject may match the English translation, while message-body search still matches the original-language content. For those reviewed conversations, try both the original-language phrase and the English translated subject.
It uses Postgres full-text matching, which means:
- Words match stems —
refundingmatchesrefundandrefunded, and the last word is matched as a prefix - Common stop words (the, and, of) are ignored
- Search is case-insensitive
- Quoting does not give you a phrase search.
"refund denied"finds conversations containing both words anywhere, not the two words together. Quotes only mean something in the Quick tab’s operator syntax, where they group a multi-word operator value —from:"John Doe"
Partial names do work for contacts: searching smit finds “John Smith”, because the contact branch matches on substring as well as on stems. What partial words will not do is reach message bodies — those go through stemmed full-text matching, so a fragment that is not a word prefix finds nothing there. If the body has the word but in an attachment, search may not find it (attachments aren’t indexed).
One more limit worth knowing on a busy workspace: a message-body or comment search collects at most 5,000 matching messages before ranking, and which 5,000 is not stable between runs. If a common word returns a suspiciously arbitrary set, search something rarer — a serial number, an order reference, the exact subject.
Was it deleted?
In normal conversation workflows, Atender doesn’t expose a delete action. If a conversation seems gone, it’s most likely archived, merged into another conversation, hidden by a filter, or outside your access scope.
Spam is the real exception, in two ways. First, a conversation marked as spam drops out of every tab and every filtered list — it lives only on the Spam page, so check there before concluding anything is missing. Second, spam is the one thing Atender genuinely deletes: from the Spam page it can be permanently deleted with the row delete action or bulk delete (both confirm first), and spam older than 30 days is hard-deleted automatically, along with its messages and attachments. A conversation wrongly flagged as spam and left there past that window is gone, not archived. If you genuinely think a non-spam conversation has been deleted, contact Atender support — they can confirm what happened.
Quick checklist when you can’t find a conversation
- Open the filter panel and click Clear all, then set Quick Filter back to Everything
- Switch to the Done and Snoozed tabs, and to Alia if a stack may have handled it
- Search by the customer’s name, the conversation ID, or a memorable phrase from the conversation
- Check the Spam page
- Check the customer’s contact in the CRM — every prior conversation is listed there
If after all of that the conversation truly isn’t visible, it’s almost certainly an access-scope issue. A teammate with broader access should be able to see it.