There have been countless reports about how Slack is “taking on email” or trying to “kill email” in the workplace. While these certainly seem like an exaggeration, such comments aren’t completely unfounded. Slack has quickly become a popular communication tool for teams, and has some features that just work better than email in some ways.
Today, however, Slack is actually adding a new feature that lets all teams on its Standard and Plus plans have email directed into Slack channels.
If you’re a Slack user, you can set up any channel for email integration by just picking the channel and getting a secret email address that will route directly to it. You can do so for as many channels as you like.
“Here at Slack we’ve found this feature useful for all kinds of cases where we might have otherwise forwarded emails around internally or used mailing aliases,” says Slack in a blog post.
It suggests using the feature for things like customers filling out a contact form appearing in the support channel; stats and alerts about web server health going into company-wide channels; new client contacts for CRM going into a sales leads channel; daily newsletters related to your industry appearing in appropriate groups; monthly sales summaries in the appropriate channels; etc.
“If there’s a service you’ve used for years and always wished they integrated into Slack, chances are you could get most of what you want today by giving them a channel-specific secret email address so that the email they already send you arrives in the desired channel,” Slack says.
To set it up, go to the Slack Integrations page, select a channel the email will post to, give it a label, name, and icon, and hit “save integration”. Then, copy the generated email address and add it to any service you want to have sent to the Slack channel.
Just like that, Slack channels have become inboxes.
Image via Slack