Important Changes to Slack Email Functionality

If you use functionality within Slack that enables emails to appear directly in your channels, you may have noticed some changes lately, or even an inability to use this feature at all. Here’s what’s happening and what you can do.

What changed?

Slack has officially discontinued its original "Email" app. While they have introduced a replacement called Channel Email Addresses, Slack has confirmed this new feature is not compatible with our Slack enterprise grid configuration despite it appearing enabled in individual workspace settings.

The impact on you

• For existing setups: If you already have the legacy "Email" app installed in a channel, it may continue to work for now, but you won’t be able to add it to any new workspaces. Since Slack hasn’t provided a timeline for how long the legacy app will continue working, we recommend proactively implementing a workaround to avoid future disruption.
• For new setups: You’ll need to choose an alternate method to create email connections for your channels.

Recommended workarounds

Want to send emails to Slack? These tools can help—choose the one that works best for your needs.

1. Outlook Add-in: Use the Slack for Outlook add-in within Outlook to forward specific emails into a Slack channel or direct message. This works best when you want to selectively and manually forward an email to Slack—not for automated alerts.
2. Zapier: For automated workflows (e.g., "whenever I get an email with this subject, post it to Slack"), you can use Zapier to move information from your email account to your Slack workspace.
3. Route to another service first: Consider routing emails into another system, such as ServiceNow or Jira, first then forwarding to Slack from there with another integration.
4. Webhooks: Webhooks are automated messages sent from apps when something happens. Developers and technical teams can explore using webhooks to build custom integrations that post email content to Slack. Workspace owners are able to approve the webhook request after it’s installed on the workspace.
5. Advanced custom solutions: Consider creating a custom service using Slack’s API with AWS Simple Email Service (SES) and a Lambda function, Google Apps Script, or a Microsoft Power Automate to call Slack’s webhooks. Note that these methods are significantly more advanced and may incur costs.

A quick security reminder

Stanford Slack is approved for Low and Moderate Risk Data, and for High Risk Data (but not protected health information) only in private channels and direct messages.

Questions?

If you have any questions or need help choosing the right option, please submit a Help request to the Stanford Slack team.