Your first drafts

Once your help desk, your API key and your docs are in place, one setting remains: which inboxes Overdesk may draft in. Name them, and drafts start arriving on your open conversations within the next 15 minutes, unsent, for your team to review.

Choose the inboxes to draft in

Overdesk drafts only in the inboxes listed in Allowed inboxes. Until you fill it in, nothing is drafted.

1. Open Settings → General. The field appears once a help desk is connected.
2. In Allowed inboxes, enter all to draft in every inbox, or list the mailbox numbers you want, separated by commas, such as 82640,93411.
3. Choose Save.

On Help Scout and FreeScout, a mailbox's number is in your browser's address bar when you open it. On Zendesk, enter all, or a group number to limit the scheduled runs to that group; real-time drafts still need all. On Intercom, enter all. With more than one help desk connected, put the help desk's name in front of each number, like Help Scout:82640. Allowed inboxes covers every form the field accepts.

The same field also decides where triage, tagging and follow-up nudges work.

When drafts arrive

Auto-draft replies runs every 15 minutes. Each run looks at the 25 most urgent open conversations that changed in the last 14 days, across every help desk you have connected, and drafts a reply for any that does not have one yet.

To see it work straight away, choose Run auto-draft on the Agent drafts page. Before your first draft exists, Home offers the same thing as Generate sample drafts. If a run is already going, Overdesk tells you so instead of starting a second one.

To have a new conversation drafted the moment it arrives, add webhooks.

Where to find them

Each draft appears in two places:

• In your help desk, on the conversation. By default it arrives as an internal note. On Help Scout and FreeScout you can have it arrive as an unsent draft reply in the composer instead, under Guardrails → Send mode, in Where drafts go. See Where drafts go.
• On the Agent drafts page in Overdesk, with the model, confidence and cost of each one. The conversation number links straight to the conversation in Help Scout, Zendesk or FreeScout.

Review and send

Read the draft in your help desk, edit what needs editing, and send the reply from there as you always do. From a draft's page in Overdesk you can also Edit, Re-draft or Discard it. Reviewing drafts explains what each one does to the copy in your help desk.

Overdesk never messages a customer, and sending directly from Overdesk is disabled. Every reply your customers receive is sent by someone on your team. On FreeScout, keep drafts as internal notes until your API and Webhooks module is 1.0.103 or newer: an older one may send a draft reply itself. See Where drafts go.

If nothing arrives

Work down this list:

1. Allowed inboxes is empty, or does not name the inbox the conversation is in.
2. The Agent drafts page shows a banner about a documentation site: add your docs address in Settings → Knowledge base.
3. Schedules has no Auto-draft replies row: your Anthropic API key is not saved yet.
4. Guardrails → Send mode is set to Paused. Switch it back to Draft assist.
5. The conversation has not changed in the last 14 days, so the scheduled run passes over it.

Runs shows every run of Auto-draft replies and what it reported.