What is a message request?

The rule depends on the kind of account receiving the message, and the two kinds look in opposite directions.

• Personal accounts: messages from people you follow go straight to your chats. Messages from people you don’t follow, and haven’t messaged before, arrive as requests.
• Business and creator accounts: Meta’s developer documentation says new conversations from the account’s followers start in the Primary folder, and those from people who don’t follow it start in Requests.
• Group chats: if everyone on Instagram can add you to groups, invitations from accounts you’re not connected with go to your requests. Choose Only people you follow and just those accounts, plus people you’ve messaged before, can add you.
• Blocked accounts: they can’t send you message requests or add you to groups.

You can change where requests go. In Settings, under How others can interact with you, open Messages and story replies, then Message controls. There you decide whether messages from different groups of people land in your requests folder, and whether you receive requests from them at all.

Opening a request doesn’t accept it. The conversation stays in the requests folder until you tap Accept, and only then do its messages appear in your chat list.

For a shop or creator, the requests folder is where many first-time customers land, because people often message a business before they follow it. An unchecked folder can mean missing the very people who are about to buy.

• Replies from connected apps move the chat. Meta’s documentation says that once a business answers through an app, such as an inbox or auto-reply tool, the conversation moves to the General folder, whatever the inbox settings.
• Connected tools lose sight of old requests. Requests with no activity for 30 days are no longer returned through Meta’s API, so clear the folder in the Instagram app now and then.
• The 24-hour clock still runs. A request is a message from a customer, so a connected tool has 24 hours from their last message to answer it.
• Your DMs can be requests too. A private reply your business sends to a commenter who doesn’t follow you usually lands in their requests, not their chats.
• Ads and products still reach you. Instagram’s Help Center says changing your message request setting doesn’t affect messaging ads or monetized content, so you can still get messages through ad campaigns and products you’ve shared.

Tip: When an auto-reply sends commenters a DM, say so in the public reply: “Sent you a message. If you don’t follow us, look in your message requests.” Otherwise they may never think to look there.