This is awesome, even if a little ironic considering Slack meant to reduce email.
However, Slack doesn't provide an easy way to chat with external people easily. You can invite them into a specific room but there's a ton of friction in doing so.
Thanks @rrhoover! Totally agree about this being a bit ironic.
We just found that using DMs for all the things was a major hurdle to getting any deep focus work done. Even with features like DND, it's still hard to ignore a DM when it comes rolling in.
You bring up an interesting point about communicating with people outside your Slack team. This isn't currently documented, but PigeonBot allows you to tag an email address instead of a Slack handle for situations like this.
@rrhoover I work at MailClark.ai and we've been working on integrating external communications into Slack (you may have seen our Twitter for Slack campaign on PH yesterday).
Our bot allows to have any combination of Slack and email users in a Slack channel, where Slack messages are sent out as emails in a conversation, and emails are received as Slack messages. It's a great way to work in Slack with clients / external people who only use email.
I feel PigeonBot is complementary, because it allows you to email people inside your Slack team rather than external people.
I work with Derek at Wildbit, and we love this tool internally. We're a mostly-remote team who try to be respectful and honor Slack DND and offline times. The ability to quickly email someone from inside Slack instead of sending them a DM really improved how mindful we are about those boundaries.
We've been test driving this internally at Wildbit, and it's a dream. At first glance, it feels like such a simple idea, but it's one of those things that has really paid off in terms of reducing interruptions in Slack. It's a deceptively powerful tool for teams that really care about reducing interruptions so everyone can focus better.
Whenever I go and start typing a DM, about 75% of the time, it's something that could just as easily be sent in an email and should be. Now, instead of copying/pasting and switching apps, i just add "/email @username" at the beginning and hit enter and get back to whatever I'm doing without breaking stride.
We've come full circle, from email overload, to chat overload, back to email (overload?). Snark aside, I think this is a useful tool. Not everything is important or urgent and being able to use Slack to email someone is quite neat. I'm sure this will be baked into Slack soon enough :)
Looks like it has a lot of potential for certain user cases. My pain point is those people who don't use Slack daily (clients and certain staff members) and as a result miss some messages. I'd really like the ability to forward messages in Slack to email; this seems to email only.
(Slack has become sort of my communications center--I can see all important messages in one place rather than hopping around. I realize others probably use it more for just messaging.)
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