How to forward email to Slack and reply from the channel
Slack's built-in ways to forward email to a channel, where they stop, and how we route our support inbox into Slack and answer customers from the card.
Most small teams want email in Slack for the same reason. Customers write to help@ or sales@, and those addresses end up forwarding to a couple of people's personal inboxes. Whoever happens to check first answers. Everyone else has no idea it happened, so a customer either gets two replies or none.
Moving that email into a Slack channel fixes the visibility part, because the whole team sees what came in. This guide covers the ways Slack lets you forward email in, where each one stops, and the setup we use at Supertype to answer customers from the channel itself.
How to forward email to Slack
Slack has three built-in ways to get an email into Slack:
| Option | Plans | How it works |
|---|---|---|
| Channel email address | Paid plans | Each channel can get its own address. Anything sent to it posts in the channel. |
| Slack for Gmail or Outlook | All plans | An add-on in your mail client. You open an email and send it to a channel or DM by hand. |
| Slackbot forwarding address | All plans | A personal address. Emails you forward to it show up in your DM with Slackbot. |
For a shared inbox, the channel email address is the one you want, because it's the only one that runs without someone clicking. To set it up:
- Open the channel, click its name in the header, and open the Integrations tab. Newer versions of Slack call it Automations.
- Choose Send emails to this channel and click Get Email Address.
- In Gmail, Google Workspace or Outlook, add that address as a forwarding destination for your help@ inbox.
Gmail sends a confirmation email to a new forwarding address before it forwards anything. Since that address is the channel, the confirmation shows up in the channel and you can click it from there.
Where the built-in options stop
Once email lands in Slack, everyone can read it, but nobody can answer it there. To reply, someone has to go back to their mail client, find the same email, and write back from the shared address, if they have access to it. Nothing in the channel tells the others that a reply went out, so you are back to guessing who has it.
A few other things we ran into:
- Everything comes through. Auto-replies, newsletters and bounce notices post in the channel the same way a customer does, and the real messages get buried.
- Anyone with the address can post. Slack's help page says so directly. If the address leaks, so does access to your channel.
- The sender is just text. There is no record of who this person is, what they bought, or whether they wrote in last month.
None of this matters if you only want a read-only feed of an inbox. It matters a lot when that inbox is where customers ask you for things.
How we forward our support inbox to Slack
We built the inbound side of Viably to answer email from the channel it lands in. Every workspace gets an inbox address when Viably is installed, shown on your dashboard home and under Webhook Relay. It looks like [email protected].
Setup is a forward from the address you already have:
- Copy your Viably inbox address from the dashboard.
- Forward your help@ or sales@ address to it. This works from Cloudflare Email Routing, Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. You don't touch your MX records, and your current inbox keeps getting its copy.
- Send a test email. The sender shows up in Contacts within a moment, and the email posts as a card in the channel you picked.
If your domain uses Cloudflare Email Routing, Cloudflare sends a verification link to any new destination before it forwards to it. That link arrives at your Viably address, so Viably catches it and puts a Verify with Cloudflare button at the top of your Webhook Relay page. One click and you're done.
Replying from Slack
Each email posts as a card with a Reply button. What you write goes out as a real email from your inbox address, threaded with the original, so the customer sees one conversation. The reply is logged on the customer's timeline, and they're assigned to whoever answered. The next person to open the thread can see it's handled.
Only people get through
Viably filters auto-responders, mailing lists, bounces and anything flagged as spam before it becomes a card. Each filtered email is still kept in the inbox's event log with the reason it was set aside, so you can check what got filtered.
The sender becomes a contact
Every sender is matched by email address, so someone who filled in your form in March and wrote to support in June is one record. Their payments, form fills and earlier emails all sit on the same timeline, and you can read that before you reply. The inbound email docs cover the setup for each mail provider in more detail.
The free plan includes one inbox. Add Viably to Slack, forward help@ to the address it gives you, and send yourself a test.
Forwarding Slack messages to email
Sometimes you need the reverse: a thread with a client's decision in it needs to reach someone who isn't in your Slack. In Viably you react to the message with ✉️ and pick a recipient, and the whole thread goes out as one email, replies and images included. Recipients have to verify their address once, which stops an internal thread from going to a typo. The Slack to email docs cover how verification and trusted company domains work.
Frequently asked questions
Can I forward email to Slack for free?
Yes. Slack for Gmail, Slack for Outlook and the Slackbot forwarding address work on every Slack plan. Channel email addresses need a paid Slack plan. Viably's free plan includes one inbox address that posts to a channel.
How do I automatically forward emails to a Slack channel?
Get the channel's email address from its Integrations or Automations tab, then add it as a forwarding destination in your mail provider. With Viably, you forward to your workspace's inbox address instead, and you can reply from the card that posts.
Can I reply to an email from Slack?
Slack's built-in options only post the email. You reply from your mail client. With Viably, the card has a Reply button, and the answer goes out from your own inbox address, threaded with the customer's email.
Do I need to change my MX records?
No. You add a forward from the address you already use, and your current inbox keeps receiving everything as before.
Will newsletters and auto-replies end up in the channel?
With a Slack channel address, yes, everything sent to it posts. Viably filters automated and bulk mail first and keeps a log of what it filtered and why.
Add Viably to Slack and forward your support inbox to it. Your team sees every customer email in the channel and can answer it there.