When a text leaves your inbox

What it is

A new text does two things at once: it puts that conversation in your Inbox, and it gives it an unread dot in the SMS list. Opening the conversation now clears both — the thread leaves the Inbox and the dot goes away, in the same moment you open it.

Put simply: reading a text is dealing with it. You no longer have to open a thread and then separately dismiss it to get it out of the Inbox.

Where to find it

Nowhere to switch on — this is simply what opening an SMS conversation does. It applies everywhere you can open one: the SMS panel, the Inbox, a notification or search result, the phone/web view, and the CLI's /sms/.../read route.

How it behaves

What removes a thread from the Inbox

• Opening it — in the SMS panel, from the Inbox, from a notification, or from search.
• Replying to it inside Omniscio (unchanged).
• Archiving it (unchanged).
• Replying from your phone — picked up on the next sync (unchanged).
• "Mark as read" — from the Inbox row's menu, the batch Mark-as-read, or the button in a conversation (unchanged).

What does NOT remove a thread

The app moves the cursor on its own, and none of those moves clear anything — otherwise a text you never looked at could quietly vanish from your Inbox:

• the cursor moving to the next row after you dismiss, archive or snooze something, and after a bulk version of the same;
• the automatic eject — when a session changes status in the background and the app moves you off its row onto the next one;
• the idle auto-select that opens the first Inbox row when you're sitting on an empty pane;
• a brand-new text auto-opening into an empty Inbox;
• the background refresh when your phone syncs.

The line the app draws is who moved: your own click, key, swipe or notification tap opens a thread and clears it; anything the app did by itself leaves it alone. That distinction is checked by a test that scans every place the app can move the Inbox cursor, so a new one can't quietly start clearing things.

A text that arrives while you have the conversation open

It still lands in the Inbox and still counts as unread-worthy. Opening the conversation again (or Mark-as-read) clears it. Omniscio deliberately does not treat "a thread happens to be open" as "you read this" — the conversation stays selected while you're off in another project, so trusting that would swallow a text you never saw.

The trade, stated plainly

A text you read but never replied to leaves your Inbox — and it also leaves the daily digest, which keys on the same "needs your attention" flag. Nothing is lost: the whole conversation is always in the SMS list, and the next text from that number puts it straight back in the Inbox.

For agents

Where it lives in code

• src/main/db/queries-sms/conversations.ts — markConversationHandled(...), the ONE "dispose from the inbox" write (clears needs_attention and unread_count together).
• src/main/ipc/sms-handlers.ts — the sms:mark-read handler (fired when a thread is opened) and its sms:conversation-updated push.
• src/main/services/cli/cli-server-sms-routes.ts — POST /sms/conversations/:phoneNumber/read, the CLI twin.
• src/renderer/src/stores/sms-store.ts — selectConversation(phone, { markHandled }) (default true = a user open = dispose), the idempotent markAsRead, and the three app-driven call sites that pass markHandled: false.
• src/renderer/src/lib/inbox-open-source.ts — isUserInboxOpen(source): the ONE classification of "a person opened this row" vs "the app moved the cursor onto it", with a scan test over every activateUnifiedItem call site.
• src/renderer/src/stores/inbox-source-behaviors.ts · src/renderer/src/stores/inbox-advance-side-effects.ts — the SMS behavior's openDetail (which consults that classifier) and the idle auto-select / post-dismiss advance loaders.

The full engineering contract (the invariant, every writer of the flag, and the safe-change checklist) is .claude/memory/contracts/sms-inbox-attention-contract.md.

Related

• inbox-overview.md — the unified triage view these rows appear in.
• set-up-sms-integration.md — how the SMS integration works.
• sms-inbox-preload.md — why the tap on a phone is instant.
• cli-sms.md — the same behaviour from an agent.