Front

The Front integration captures conversations from your Front shared inboxes in real time. Customer messages, your team’s replies, and the internal comments alongside them flow into Modem, where they are grouped into topics, classified by type, and linked to the people and companies behind them.

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How it works

Modem connects to your Front company with OAuth, authorized once by a Front admin. During that exchange Modem records which Front company the connection belongs to, which is also how it attributes each incoming webhook delivery to your organization. From then on Front pushes conversation activity to Modem as it happens: new messages, comments, and changes to a conversation’s status, assignee, and tags. Every delivery is signature-verified and time-stamped, and Modem rejects deliveries that fail verification or arrive more than five minutes late. Front access tokens are short-lived, so a background job refreshes the connection’s credentials before they expire. The connection normally stays authenticated without any action from you. Connecting also requests a one-time backfill of your recent conversations, so history shows up without waiting for new traffic. See Historical Backfill below.

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Prerequisites

• Owner or admin role in your Modem organization, to connect and manage the integration
• A Front admin to authorize the connection. Front only lets admins authorize an app, and a non-admin’s attempt comes back as a rejected grant.
• Access to the Front beta for your Modem organization (see the note above)

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Setup

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Permissions

Modem’s Front app holds read-only access, configured on the app itself rather than requested each time someone connects. There is nothing to pick during authorization: a Front admin approves the connection, and the app’s read access applies. Modem can read:

• Shared inbox conversations and their messages
• Internal comments on those conversations
• Contacts and teammates on a conversation
• Conversation metadata: inbox, status, and tags

Modem does not access:

• Sending, replying, or changing anything in Front
• Private (individual) inboxes
• Front account credentials or billing information

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What Gets Captured

All shared inboxes in the connected company are captured. There is no inbox picker: each inbox becomes its own channel in Modem, and a conversation is filed under the inbox it lives in.

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Messages and comments

Each Front conversation is captured as one conversation in Modem, threaded like a support ticket:

• Inbound messages from customers and other external parties
• Outbound messages your teammates send in reply
• Internal comments written by your team, marked as internal

Email bodies are cleaned before they’re stored: quoted-reply chains and signature blocks are stripped, so topics quote what the person actually wrote rather than the history beneath it. Short-form channels Front delivers (chat, SMS, and similar) are kept as-is, since a trailing “Thanks” there is content rather than a signature. Inline attachment data is dropped; attachment files themselves are not ingested. Modem reacts to these Front events: Status, inbox, and tag changes are recorded on the conversation for context, but these housekeeping entries don’t feed topic analysis; only real messages and comments do.

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Conversation status

Front’s conversation statuses are mapped onto Modem’s conversation states. Companies using Front’s ticket statuses get the finer-grained mapping through the status category: A deleted conversation, or one with a status Modem doesn’t recognize, keeps its last known state rather than being guessed at.

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Authors

Customers are captured with the name and address they wrote from and, when Front has linked the message to a contact, that contact’s identity, so the same person is recognized across conversations and resolves to Modem people. Your teammates are captured with their Front email addresses, so replies link to existing team members instead of creating duplicates. Front’s automated identities (rules, AI, API and integration senders, bulk replies, and similar) are flagged as bots.

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Historical Backfill

Connecting requests a one-time import of your recent history automatically: conversations started in the last 90 days, up to 500 conversations, along with their messages and comments. The window is measured from when a conversation was created, not when it was last active, so a long-running thread opened before the window isn’t included even if it received a reply yesterday. It runs in the background and doesn’t block real-time capture. Front’s API is rate-limited, so a busy company can take a while to finish. The backfill runs once per connection; reconnecting the same company later doesn’t run it again.

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Analyzing Front Conversations

Once conversations are flowing, ask the Modem Agent about them from the web dashboard like any other source.

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Troubleshooting

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Disconnecting

To disconnect Front:

1. Go to Settings → Integrations → Front
2. Click Disconnect and confirm

Modem stops accepting deliveries for the company immediately and stops refreshing its stored credentials, though the disconnected connection record is retained. Nothing was created in your Front company when you connected, so there is nothing to clean up on the Front side; to revoke Modem’s access at the source, remove the Modem app from your Front company’s settings, which invalidates the tokens Modem holds. Historical data remains in Modem after disconnecting.

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