Often touted by the press as an “email killer”, communication platform Slack has just launched an integration with email.
All users and teams on the Standard or Plus plans can now direct emails straight into Slack channels.
To do this, Slack users simply pick which channel they want to send emails to, and a secret email address is generated, which routes directly to the Slack channel.
In a blog post, Slack, which is used by online dating businesses including Zoosk, said: “Slack is designed to help teams improve their communication, but eliminating email completely isn’t the goal. Email remains ubiquitous and is quite useful for getting updates from pretty much every service on the Internet.”
The company also gave some possible use cases of the new feature, including:
- Customers who fill a contact form on your site could have their emails sent directly to your customer support’s Slack channel.
- Weekly stats and infrequent alerts about web server health can go into company-wide channels for everyone to track how your site is doing.
- Daily newsletters pertinent to your industry can be delivered right to the groups most interested in them.
- Monthly sales summaries and nightly updates from financial services can hit your #bizops channel.
- Alerts of all kinds (server down, weather events, traffic closures, domain name renewals) can be pointed at your company’s #general for all to see and act upon.
To implement this new feature, you just choose the Email option on Slack’s Integrations page.
From here you can select the channel, give it a name, and an email address will be generated that you can use to send emails into the channel.
You can then repeat this for as many channels as you want.
Find out more here.