People do not keep to one channel. The same customer sends a WhatsApp message on Monday, replies to your email on Wednesday, and texts you from a different phone on Friday because that was the number they had. In most tools those are three unrelated records in three places, and the work of putting them back together is yours.
Spun keeps one conversation per person instead. That conversation can hold WhatsApp messages, SMS, email, Spun Chat, Human Support tickets and phone calls, all in one timeline sorted by one clock, so Wednesday sits between Monday and Friday no matter which channel each one arrived on. What it does not do is decide for you which of those channels you want on screen. You start on one, and you bring in the others yourself.
A combined thread is not a combined inbox
This distinction matters enough to be the first thing on the page, because the two ideas sound alike and behave nothing alike. The merge in Spun happens inside one conversation with one person. It never happens across people.
Your chat list is the chat list you already have: one row per conversation, ordered by whatever arrived most recently, with one unread count. There is no second list of email, no mailbox view per channel, and no second unread badge to keep at zero. Filtering the list by channel is a filter on the list that was already there, not a separate place to go.
So there is no screen in Spun that shows you every email from everybody. There is a conversation with one person, and inside it, if you want them there, their emails sit next to their WhatsApp messages in the order things happened. That is the whole of it, and it is deliberate: a combined inbox recreates the problem it claims to solve, which is a pile of messages with no person attached to them.
One conversation per person also means one place to look for context. The contact panel, the notes, the tasks and the history all hang off the same conversation, whichever channel the last message came in on.
What you see the first time, before you change anything
A user who has never opened the channel dropdown sees WhatsApp rows and nothing else. That is the default in the code, not a description of a typical setup: the stored view mode starts on WhatsApp with an empty set of extra channels, so a conversation opens showing one channel even when it holds messages on four.
This is on purpose. A thread that quietly folded five channels together the first time you opened it would be a surprise, and surprises in a message list are expensive: you scroll past something because it did not look like the thing you were reading. So Spun shows you one channel, tells you in the dropdown which other channels this conversation has, and waits.
Phone calls are the one thing that comes along without being asked for. A call row belongs to WhatsApp as far as the timeline is concerned, so calls appear whenever WhatsApp rows do, which is what anyone would expect of a call that was placed inside a WhatsApp conversation.
- The default channel is WhatsApp, and the default set of extra channels is empty.
- Nothing is hidden from you: the dropdown lists every channel this conversation actually has.
- Bringing another channel into the timeline is one click, and it stays until you click it again.
- The day headings in the thread are worked out from the rows that are showing, so they always match what is on screen.
Ticking a channel, and what a tick actually does
Open the dropdown beside the contact name and each channel has a small tick box. Tick Email and email rows join the timeline in their proper places, in time order, alongside the WhatsApp messages. Untick it and they leave again. The channel you are currently on is always shown, and its box says so rather than pretending to be optional.
One thing surprises people in a good way: the ticks are yours, not the conversation. There is a single set per user, and it applies whichever channel you are currently on and whichever conversation you have open. Decide that you always want SMS in view and you have decided it once, for every contact, rather than per person and per channel and per visit.
That choice is stored against you and your organisation, never against the browser in general, and it is also kept on the server as part of your inbox preferences. Open Spun on your phone or on a different computer and your channels are the ones you picked. Someone else in your team who prefers WhatsApp alone keeps WhatsApp alone: their view of the same conversation is theirs.
A tick for a channel that a particular conversation does not have costs nothing and does nothing. It is not an error state and there is no warning: the timeline simply has no rows of that kind to show, and Spun treats a thread as mixed only when a ticked channel is genuinely contributing messages to it. When it is, WhatsApp and Spun messages pick up a small channel label, so a mixed thread never leaves you guessing which channel a message came in on.
Opening every chat on the same channel
Next to each tick box is a pin. Ticking decides what else you see; pinning decides where you land. Pin a channel and every conversation you open opens on it, which is the right setting for someone whose day is one channel: a support agent living in Human Support, or a salesperson who works the email channel and glances at the rest.
There is one pin per person, and it can sit on any channel. Open a conversation that does not have the pinned channel and it falls back to the channel that conversation lives on for the moment, without dropping your pin, so a single WhatsApp-only contact does not undo a setting you meant for the other two hundred.
With nothing pinned, each conversation opens on whichever channel carries its newest message. That is the behaviour most people want without knowing they wanted it: the last thing that happened is the thing you are looking at.
Which channels a given conversation actually has
The dropdown does not offer five channels to every contact. It offers the ones that conversation really has, worked out from the contact record and from how the conversation started.
A contact with no phone number has no SMS row. A contact with no record, and therefore no address, has no Email row. Someone who is not on Spun has no Spun Chat row. Human Support appears only where it can exist, which is a customer card seen by a support agent. And a conversation that began as an email to an address you had, with no WhatsApp behind it at all, is an email conversation: it has Email, and it gains other channels only if the person turns out to be reachable another way.
The same is true in reverse for a conversation that started on Spun Chat. It has no WhatsApp leg and does not pretend to, and it opens on the channel it lives on.
This is why the dropdown is worth opening even when you do not want to change anything. It is the quickest honest answer to the question of how you can actually reach this person, and it will tell you when the answer is only one way.
Related: Connecting WhatsApp to Spun
Which channel your reply goes out on
Mixing channels in one view raises an obvious worry: if five channels are on screen, what happens when you type? The answer is that nothing is ambiguous, because two different actions do two different things.
The channel you are on is the channel you send on. It is named on the dropdown, and it decides which composer is sitting under the thread: the WhatsApp composer, the SMS composer, the email composer with its subject line and its sending limits, or the Spun Chat one. Switching channel switches the composer, and you can see which one you have before you write a word.
Replying to a specific message is the second action. Use the reply on an SMS row and the SMS composer opens, addressed to the number that message came from. Use it on an email row and the email composer opens on that email thread, so the reply lands as a reply rather than as a new message. Neither one changes the channel you were on: answer the email, and you are still where you were.
- The current channel is shown in the dropdown at all times, and it is the channel a plain reply goes out on.
- A reply on a row uses the channel of that row, addressed to the number or thread it came from.
- Replying to a row does not change the channel you are on, so a one-off answer does not move you.
- Every channel keeps its own rules when you send on it. Email still resolves the recipient from the contact record and still shows its limits before you send.
Setting it up
- 1
Open any conversation
One conversation per person is how Spun already works. There is nothing to enable and no setting to find first.
- 2
Open the channel dropdown beside the name
It shows the channels this conversation has: WhatsApp, Spun, Human Support where it applies, SMS with a row per number, and Email. The channel you are on is marked.
- 3
Tick the channels you want in the timeline
Tick Email, or SMS, or both. Those rows join the thread in time order at once. Untick to send them away again. The current channel is always shown and cannot be unticked.
- 4
Pin a channel if you always start there
The pin next to a channel makes every conversation open on it. Leave it unpinned and each conversation opens on the channel with its newest message.
- 5
Carry on working
Your ticks and your pin are stored against you, per organisation, and synced to your account, so they are the same on your phone and on any other computer you sign in from.
Related: Every feature Spun ships · How Spun protects your data