---
title: Inbox backlog nudge (a reminder to archive when sessions pile up)
---

# Inbox backlog nudge (a reminder to archive when sessions pile up)

## What it is

When a stack of sessions has been waiting for you for days and you're still working but not clearing them, Omniscio drops **one** gentle inbox card a day suggesting you archive what you're done with. It's a nudge toward the archive habit — so your inbox doesn't quietly grow to hundreds of stale items. It runs entirely on your machine, uses **no AI** (so it costs nothing), and is capped at one card per day.

It never fires on a busy day of fresh items you're actively clearing: the trigger is **quantity _and_ age**, not a raw count, plus a check that you're active but not already archiving.

## Where to find it

It arrives on its own as a card in your **inbox** — there is nothing to open. The switch that silences it for good is **Settings → Notifications → Inbox backlog nudges**, and the card itself carries a **Turn off these nudges** button that flips the same setting.

## How it behaves

### When it appears

The card appears only when **all** of these are true at once (checked about every 30 minutes):

- **A real, aged backlog** — at least **15** sessions needing your attention (Needs You / Error / Stalled) that have been waiting **3+ days**. Fresh items and snoozed items don't count.
- **You're actually working** — you've sent a message to a session in the last **24 hours**, so it never nags you while you're away, even if agents are still running in the background.
- **You're not already archiving** — fewer than **3** manual archives in the past week. If you're clearing your inbox, there's nothing to nudge.

If you clear the backlog, today's card removes itself.

### How to use it

- **Archive what you're done with.** The very sessions it's about are right there in your inbox — archive from the row or with the archive control in the session header.
- **Don't want these?** Click **Turn off these nudges** on the card, or use **Settings → Notifications → Inbox backlog nudges**. Turning **Tips & Guidance** off silences it along with every other hint.

### Settings

**Settings → Notifications:**

- **Inbox backlog nudges** (`inboxBacklogNudgeEnabled`, default **on**).

The thresholds (15 items, 3+ days, once a day) are fixed sensible defaults — there's nothing to tune.

## For agents

### How it works

- A small background checker (registered as a leaf startup task) runs every ~30 minutes. It reads three local signals — the aged-backlog count, your most recent session message time, and your recent manual-archive count — and a pure evaluator decides whether to raise.
- "Not archiving" is a simple floor: fewer than 3 `session_archive_via_button` / `session_archive_via_shortcut` events in the last 7 days.
- The daily card is deduplicated by a `inbox-backlog-nudge:<local-date>` key, so a restart or a second check the same day can't double-fire.
- The nudge counts **sessions**, and the card it raises is an inbox alert (a different table), so the card can never inflate the backlog it's reporting.

**Where it lives:** `src/main/services/inbox-backlog-nudge/` (the checker + the three signal queries + the pure evaluator), `src/shared/alert-features/inbox-backlog-nudge-alert.ts` (shared dedup key + gate), and the card's "Turn off these nudges" mute in `src/renderer/src/features/alerts/AlertInboxViewer.tsx`. It reuses the shared inbox-alert primitive ([inbox-alerts.md](inbox-alerts.md)) for dedup, snooze, and dismissal.

## Related

The card it raises is an [inbox alert](inbox-alerts.md), which owns the dismissal, snooze and dedup behaviour it reuses. The inbox it is nudging you to clear is described in the [Inbox overview](inbox-overview.md).