8 ms·

Designing an email-only Slack interface

155 points by luu 8y ago

Rjevski 8y ago
Great write-up, however I have concerns over the security of this product, especially the part where they submit a Slack token directly over email. Email itself is not secure, but at the very least an attacker intercepting a single message will only get the content of that message. An attacker intercepting the token will however gain persistent, remote access to all their current & future Slack messages with no way for the user to even know they've been compromised.
- buraksarica 8y ago
  Totally agree. The intent may be for good but this is the textbook example of "how not to acquire sensitive information".
hultner 8y ago
Neat idea for a minimal slack experience. However if all you want is a low bandwidth text only slack alternative to use with slow and glitchy cellular I’ve got an excellent alternative: wee-slack + mosh https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack wee-slack gives you a minimal terminal based slack client within weechat and mosh handles ssh connections over low bandwidth, high latency connections. Using this set up I’ve been able to reply to messages at times a ping to 8.8.8.8 resulted in >90% package loss.
- wootbeep 8y ago
  Nice, you've got a great option for low bandwidth. With lots of functionality! Your project name wins a lot of points with me. We wanted Stop Slacking in email for two reasons beyond bandwidth: + I find group chat distracting + I already need to use email (as a freelancer with multiple clients) so this streamlined comms into one medium Thanks for sharing wee-slack!
  - Rjevski 8y ago
    Just a question, since you appear to be using email as your primary communication medium, what software/workflows do you use? On my side I always use Slack, and while I understand its drawbacks it seems to be the best for me so curious to know about other approaches.
    - wootbeep 8y ago
      That's a big question. I mainly use email as one of my todo lists. I get notifications from tools like Jira, Trello, and Basecamp, depending on my client. Basecamp introduced me to reply-by-email notifications. :) The experience of a Slack workspace varies greatly between teams. Slack itself is just a tool. If it works for you, keep rolling with it.
- llampx 8y ago
  It is because of projects like these that I hope Slack won't disable API access the way other big social network companies are doing.
  - arjun27 8y ago
    Other big social networks have a very different business model. Because they ask users to pay directly for the service, as opposed to ads on UI, using Slack via API or UI shouldn't really matter to them.
    - dewey 8y ago
      Didn't stop them from disabling the official IRC gateway they had.
      - arjun27 8y ago
        yes, you're right. However, the slack RTM API can still support IRC clients (with a little more work - need to setup the IRC server, like [1]). The API is like a superset that way. [1] https://github.com/insomniacslk/irc-slack https://github.com/insomniacslk/irc-slack
  - bitexploder 8y ago
    Slack is going the platform route. They have a huge amount to lose disabling API access. Add-ons and interconnectivity are what make Slack so popular. Without all the integration Slack becomes much less attractive.
lynaghk 8y ago
Hi friends! Keep in mind that this project was a lark that Nicki (http://www.nickivance.com/ http://www.nickivance.com/) and I literally made in the back of a van for her exact use case. My article is a fun writeup of the design considerations and challenges of an email-only UI. It's not supposed to be a marketing piece, to convince you to (not) use the service, or to pass moral judgment on anyone's preferred communication medium. I should also point out that emailing the app a Slack token is the same as emailing it a password, since the token allows it to read/write messages on your behalf (which is, of course, the whole point). Sending passwords around via email has security implications, which I'm sure you (a thoughtful, attractive, and considerate HN reader) can come to your own conclusions about based on your personal needs and risk preferences.
- buraksarica 8y ago
  Please just ask for that token and email over SSL. It's that simple. No need to risk people to lower user acquisition ramp.
  - xyzzy_plugh 8y ago
    You could, or you could just add a few round trips in the email thread and perform a handshake with the token HMAC encoded.
- fouc 8y ago
  on the stop slacking site, I think the "captions" should appear before the images. It was initially confusing because the first caption doesn't show under 800px height screen. If I hit spacebar and scroll a page, then I see "you get mentioned on slack" and the following picture that looks like an email client, which is confusing.
  - nvr219 8y ago
    omg
  - wootbeep 8y ago
    Thanks for the feedback! My screen is usually under 800px height as well, but it helps to have a fresh view on how it reads.
testfailure 8y ago
Reminded me of Stallman's approach a little :D (I fully get why this would be necessary with slack, low bandwidth hotel/train wifi etc make the desktop app basically unusable here in the UK whilst travelling). https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
saagarjha 8y ago
Of course, the irony is that Slack was supposed to replace email…
- mlatu 8y ago
  Well, I doubt you can ever replace email with a centralized proprietary system.
- ci5er 8y ago
  If so, it needs to do a better job. (Or maybe it's the way that people use #Slack. Which isn't strictly Slack's fault, but still, ...) I sort of miss when we would have internal WG-specific mailing lists, which were archived, web-available and searchable. Anyone could join (almost) any group they wanted. It was threaded (of course), and people tended to write longer more complete responses (with no reaction emoji!). Don't get me wrong - I love slack for the CI/CD stuff, and as a monitoring dashboard for all sorts of alerts that various parts of the various teams might be interested in, but it doesn't really replace the use-cases that email is actually pretty good at (in my opinion).
- paulie_a 8y ago
  Personally I prefer slack over email. I basically don't read emails anymore and just mass delete them once a month. I get so many auto generated ones I barely even check. The quality of email has such a low signal to noise it is becoming a waste of time to even check. Off topic but related to communication. I wish voicemail could be an opt out thing, I haven't listened to a message in a decade.
  - Jaruzel 8y ago
    > I wish voicemail could be an opt out thing Set your outgoing message to state that you never check them and that people should @ you on Slack instead. > I get so many auto generated ones I barely even check. That's not emails fault, that's your fault for not using the tool properly. All clients have filtering and blocking options. If you don't want the mails, tell the sender to stop sending them. A poor workman blames his tools.
  - 8y ago
arjenschat 8y ago
Both slack and email are awesome and horrible in their own way. The same goes for IM, WhatsApp, Intercom etc etc. Most productivity is actually lost by cross channel communication. As mentioned in the article "... that company communicated almost entirely via Slack" So where do I digg up the rest? It might be in a voicemail of a colleague. If slack would implement a push-IMAP api. I could at least drop one app :)
- PretzelFisch 8y ago
  I often feel that what is horrible with email is the ui.
- cryath 8y ago
  I don't see anything wrong with the majority of asynchornous communication methods. Mind you, I'm a fan of slack and a lot of people aren't. The issue though, I think, and the reason why slack is so widely used despite the fact that most users tend not to like it is because of the UI. It's friendly and easy, for surface level tasks, and that's far more important to people than the fact that it's synchronous (based off of my own experience, can't cite any stats so I'm not making a claim here). Email could very well work for this, and several apps have tried to "IM-ify" email, but none have really caught on. It's a UI and UX issue fundamentally, not a capability issue, once again according to my experience.
cncrnd 8y ago
The best slack interface I've found is appearing online with the tab closed. It's the best of both worlds: no distraction while appearing available. If someone messages you and you don't respond right away, they'll assume you are tending to more important matters.
arjun27 8y ago
This is neat. Have you seen any issues with using legacy tokens instead of normal OAuth? I made an extension[1] for using Slack inside VS Code during pair programming sessions - and it doesn't seem to work for enterprise users with legacy tokens. [1] https://github.com/karigari/vscode-chat https://github.com/karigari/vscode-chat
chiefalchemist 8y ago
> "...interact via email with the poor souls trapped in the endless, no-agenda meeting that is Slack." Most of us agree that email __as a collaboration tool__ sucks. Slack has its (growing?) contingency of haters and dismissers. But there's so something common to both: - Us - Work Perhaps it's time to come to terms with the fact that while work has its place - in the context of modern culture / society - we humans just aren't wired for such work. Tool after tool tries to solve "the problem" but time and again they "fail." As if the sky being blue is a failure.
isaack 8y ago
I have always wanted to create a Slack alternative that is built upon email. Everything happens on emails (and hidden headers), standards-compliant since day 1 and low barrier to use.
- ebiester 8y ago
  Here are some clarifying questions: * Is the client IMAP? Are there any protocols that would be required on top of it? Would there be an advantage to a separate client? * Are the contents encrypted? Will it work with other encryption strategies in other clients? How will you share the keys? If it's not encrypted, how will you share anything that cannot be public? * How do you handle who is allowed to use and who isn't? When someone is stripped of access, what happens? Does that restrict it to business applications where someone controls the email account? * How does a new individual to the chat acquire the history of the conversation? Is there some sort of mail API behind the scenes? I'm sure it's possible but I think you'd end up with a separate server and client solution and the protocol wouldn't end up making much of a difference, mostly because of encryption requirements.
- PretzelFisch 8y ago
  This might be a nice alternatives for open source work if it would tie into a email archive system as well.
matchbok 8y ago
There are just so few instances where synchronous group communication (like Slack) makes sense in a workplace. If you need to talk to a large group of people about a project, it'll be more efficient to (gasp) have a meeting. Recording/itemizing data in a slack channel is horrible and basically unsearchable after a few days. The nature of slack forces people to always "watch" for pings and channel updates, lest they get labeled a slacker for not responding. It's a 24-hour long meeting with no agenda, no guidelines, no leadership, and the occasional guy who jumps into the room with a bad joke. Total mess.
- mbil 8y ago
  I agree with most of what you're saying here, but this didn't resonate with my experience: > basically unsearchable after a few days Recently, a coworker asked me for more context about a pull request I had authored 14 months ago. Within minutes I was able to search Slack for relevant discussions, stakeholders, and reasoning.
  - peterwwillis 8y ago
    I left a message in a channel 20 days ago, but I didn't remember the exact content. I had to skip back in the channel (took a while, slack paginates and there was a lot of content), and then I had to mouse-drag to even highlight the text to copy. Incredibly inefficient. I need a chat bot to record our messages the same way we used irc bots!
  - RHSeeger 8y ago
    I find slack's search to be absolutely abysmal. If it at least logged to disk, I could grep/awk/sed it.
    - derefr 8y ago
      If you're a Slack admin, you can export a dump of the chat history. Such dumps are nominally for import into another group-chat system, but—given that the dump is just a tarball of newline-delimited JSON events, one file per channel—it's very easy to parse through in pretty much any language. And, of course, if you have a public Slack community, there's nothing stopping you from taking regular dumps and baking them into one-per-day HTML pages, and then putting the HTML files up somewhere where Google can find and index them...
zafiro17 8y ago
This was a cool project - I'm impressed. Just wanted to point out that http://topicbox.com http://topicbox.com offers similar functionality. Topicbox won't interface with Slack but rather replaces it. Run by the folks who do Fastmail, it's a modification/upgrade of old mailing list functionality. If you can get your team to use it, you can do most of what you did with Slack over an email interface that also offers perpetual archiving. I checked it out as a solution for archiving important project emails late-arrival employees would need to read to understand a project. Topicbox and this are slightly different, but both solve the high-bandwidth/low-availability problem in a way. These products that require always-on internet connectivity on robust connections really tire me out.
- senorsmile 8y ago
  This looks perfect!
- wootbeep 8y ago
  Thanks for sharing Topicbox, that hadn't come across my radar. I've been pleased with Fastmail. I can see why it would be helpful for onboarding employees. That's an important use case. Having jumped on multiple teams mid-project, it's tough trying to review a Slack channel history to get context.
foobaw 8y ago
Have you heard of Front(https://frontapp.com/ https://frontapp.com/). I know it's not exactly the same but I think Front saw similar pain points :)
kimdotcom 8y ago
You should call it listserv.
r00k 8y ago
If you're having Slack fatigue and a less interruptive approach sounds appealing, a friend is working on something you might like: https://level.app https://level.app.
- senorsmile 8y ago
  And its open source. Thanks for the share.
goatherders 8y ago
I hate slack with the fire of a thousand suns. That's all.
exotree 8y ago
As a full-time remote worker in a primarily office-based environment, Slack has been my main reason for success in working across teams.
katheriin 8y ago
Imagine, there's an app with Slack's functionality that already has such interop with email as you've built here :) Fleep: https://fleep.io/ https://fleep.io/ Anyone who does not want the group chat experience can be included in conversations via email. Currently, that does mean getting all messages via email, and not @mentions (nice idea, worth considering for Fleep's product team). But idea is similar: Full disclosure: I do work at marketing in Fleep :)

155 points by luu 8y ago

Great write-up, however I have concerns over the security of this product, especially the part where they submit a Slack token directly over email. Email itself is not secure, but at the very least an attacker intercepting a single message will only get the content of that message. An attacker intercepting the token will however gain persistent, remote access to all their current & future Slack messages with no way for the user to even know they've been compromised.

buraksarica 8y ago
Totally agree. The intent may be for good but this is the textbook example of "how not to acquire sensitive information".

hultner 8y ago

Neat idea for a minimal slack experience. However if all you want is a low bandwidth text only slack alternative to use with slow and glitchy cellular I’ve got an excellent alternative: wee-slack + mosh https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack wee-slack gives you a minimal terminal based slack client within weechat and mosh handles ssh connections over low bandwidth, high latency connections. Using this set up I’ve been able to reply to messages at times a ping to 8.8.8.8 resulted in >90% package loss.

wootbeep 8y ago
Nice, you've got a great option for low bandwidth. With lots of functionality! Your project name wins a lot of points with me. We wanted Stop Slacking in email for two reasons beyond bandwidth: + I find group chat distracting + I already need to use email (as a freelancer with multiple clients) so this streamlined comms into one medium Thanks for sharing wee-slack!
- Rjevski 8y ago
  Just a question, since you appear to be using email as your primary communication medium, what software/workflows do you use? On my side I always use Slack, and while I understand its drawbacks it seems to be the best for me so curious to know about other approaches.
  - wootbeep 8y ago
    That's a big question. I mainly use email as one of my todo lists. I get notifications from tools like Jira, Trello, and Basecamp, depending on my client. Basecamp introduced me to reply-by-email notifications. :) The experience of a Slack workspace varies greatly between teams. Slack itself is just a tool. If it works for you, keep rolling with it.
llampx 8y ago
It is because of projects like these that I hope Slack won't disable API access the way other big social network companies are doing.
- arjun27 8y ago
  Other big social networks have a very different business model. Because they ask users to pay directly for the service, as opposed to ads on UI, using Slack via API or UI shouldn't really matter to them.
  - dewey 8y ago
    Didn't stop them from disabling the official IRC gateway they had.
    - arjun27 8y ago
      yes, you're right. However, the slack RTM API can still support IRC clients (with a little more work - need to setup the IRC server, like [1]). The API is like a superset that way. [1] https://github.com/insomniacslk/irc-slack https://github.com/insomniacslk/irc-slack
- bitexploder 8y ago
  Slack is going the platform route. They have a huge amount to lose disabling API access. Add-ons and interconnectivity are what make Slack so popular. Without all the integration Slack becomes much less attractive.

lynaghk 8y ago

Hi friends! Keep in mind that this project was a lark that Nicki (http://www.nickivance.com/ http://www.nickivance.com/) and I literally made in the back of a van for her exact use case. My article is a fun writeup of the design considerations and challenges of an email-only UI. It's not supposed to be a marketing piece, to convince you to (not) use the service, or to pass moral judgment on anyone's preferred communication medium. I should also point out that emailing the app a Slack token is the same as emailing it a password, since the token allows it to read/write messages on your behalf (which is, of course, the whole point). Sending passwords around via email has security implications, which I'm sure you (a thoughtful, attractive, and considerate HN reader) can come to your own conclusions about based on your personal needs and risk preferences.

buraksarica 8y ago
Please just ask for that token and email over SSL. It's that simple. No need to risk people to lower user acquisition ramp.
- xyzzy_plugh 8y ago
  You could, or you could just add a few round trips in the email thread and perform a handshake with the token HMAC encoded.
fouc 8y ago
on the stop slacking site, I think the "captions" should appear before the images. It was initially confusing because the first caption doesn't show under 800px height screen. If I hit spacebar and scroll a page, then I see "you get mentioned on slack" and the following picture that looks like an email client, which is confusing.
- nvr219 8y ago
  omg
- wootbeep 8y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! My screen is usually under 800px height as well, but it helps to have a fresh view on how it reads.

testfailure 8y ago

Reminded me of Stallman's approach a little :D (I fully get why this would be necessary with slack, low bandwidth hotel/train wifi etc make the desktop app basically unusable here in the UK whilst travelling). https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

saagarjha 8y ago

Of course, the irony is that Slack was supposed to replace email…

mlatu 8y ago
Well, I doubt you can ever replace email with a centralized proprietary system.
ci5er 8y ago
If so, it needs to do a better job. (Or maybe it's the way that people use #Slack. Which isn't strictly Slack's fault, but still, ...) I sort of miss when we would have internal WG-specific mailing lists, which were archived, web-available and searchable. Anyone could join (almost) any group they wanted. It was threaded (of course), and people tended to write longer more complete responses (with no reaction emoji!). Don't get me wrong - I love slack for the CI/CD stuff, and as a monitoring dashboard for all sorts of alerts that various parts of the various teams might be interested in, but it doesn't really replace the use-cases that email is actually pretty good at (in my opinion).
paulie_a 8y ago
Personally I prefer slack over email. I basically don't read emails anymore and just mass delete them once a month. I get so many auto generated ones I barely even check. The quality of email has such a low signal to noise it is becoming a waste of time to even check. Off topic but related to communication. I wish voicemail could be an opt out thing, I haven't listened to a message in a decade.
- Jaruzel 8y ago
  > I wish voicemail could be an opt out thing Set your outgoing message to state that you never check them and that people should @ you on Slack instead. > I get so many auto generated ones I barely even check. That's not emails fault, that's your fault for not using the tool properly. All clients have filtering and blocking options. If you don't want the mails, tell the sender to stop sending them. A poor workman blames his tools.
- 8y ago

arjenschat 8y ago

Both slack and email are awesome and horrible in their own way. The same goes for IM, WhatsApp, Intercom etc etc. Most productivity is actually lost by cross channel communication. As mentioned in the article "... that company communicated almost entirely via Slack" So where do I digg up the rest? It might be in a voicemail of a colleague. If slack would implement a push-IMAP api. I could at least drop one app :)

PretzelFisch 8y ago
I often feel that what is horrible with email is the ui.
cryath 8y ago
I don't see anything wrong with the majority of asynchornous communication methods. Mind you, I'm a fan of slack and a lot of people aren't. The issue though, I think, and the reason why slack is so widely used despite the fact that most users tend not to like it is because of the UI. It's friendly and easy, for surface level tasks, and that's far more important to people than the fact that it's synchronous (based off of my own experience, can't cite any stats so I'm not making a claim here). Email could very well work for this, and several apps have tried to "IM-ify" email, but none have really caught on. It's a UI and UX issue fundamentally, not a capability issue, once again according to my experience.

cncrnd 8y ago

The best slack interface I've found is appearing online with the tab closed. It's the best of both worlds: no distraction while appearing available. If someone messages you and you don't respond right away, they'll assume you are tending to more important matters.

arjun27 8y ago

This is neat. Have you seen any issues with using legacy tokens instead of normal OAuth? I made an extension[1] for using Slack inside VS Code during pair programming sessions - and it doesn't seem to work for enterprise users with legacy tokens. [1] https://github.com/karigari/vscode-chat https://github.com/karigari/vscode-chat

chiefalchemist 8y ago

> "...interact via email with the poor souls trapped in the endless, no-agenda meeting that is Slack." Most of us agree that email __as a collaboration tool__ sucks. Slack has its (growing?) contingency of haters and dismissers. But there's so something common to both: - Us - Work Perhaps it's time to come to terms with the fact that while work has its place - in the context of modern culture / society - we humans just aren't wired for such work. Tool after tool tries to solve "the problem" but time and again they "fail." As if the sky being blue is a failure.

isaack 8y ago

I have always wanted to create a Slack alternative that is built upon email. Everything happens on emails (and hidden headers), standards-compliant since day 1 and low barrier to use.

ebiester 8y ago
Here are some clarifying questions: * Is the client IMAP? Are there any protocols that would be required on top of it? Would there be an advantage to a separate client? * Are the contents encrypted? Will it work with other encryption strategies in other clients? How will you share the keys? If it's not encrypted, how will you share anything that cannot be public? * How do you handle who is allowed to use and who isn't? When someone is stripped of access, what happens? Does that restrict it to business applications where someone controls the email account? * How does a new individual to the chat acquire the history of the conversation? Is there some sort of mail API behind the scenes? I'm sure it's possible but I think you'd end up with a separate server and client solution and the protocol wouldn't end up making much of a difference, mostly because of encryption requirements.
PretzelFisch 8y ago
This might be a nice alternatives for open source work if it would tie into a email archive system as well.

matchbok 8y ago

There are just so few instances where synchronous group communication (like Slack) makes sense in a workplace. If you need to talk to a large group of people about a project, it'll be more efficient to (gasp) have a meeting. Recording/itemizing data in a slack channel is horrible and basically unsearchable after a few days. The nature of slack forces people to always "watch" for pings and channel updates, lest they get labeled a slacker for not responding. It's a 24-hour long meeting with no agenda, no guidelines, no leadership, and the occasional guy who jumps into the room with a bad joke. Total mess.

mbil 8y ago
I agree with most of what you're saying here, but this didn't resonate with my experience: > basically unsearchable after a few days Recently, a coworker asked me for more context about a pull request I had authored 14 months ago. Within minutes I was able to search Slack for relevant discussions, stakeholders, and reasoning.
- peterwwillis 8y ago
  I left a message in a channel 20 days ago, but I didn't remember the exact content. I had to skip back in the channel (took a while, slack paginates and there was a lot of content), and then I had to mouse-drag to even highlight the text to copy. Incredibly inefficient. I need a chat bot to record our messages the same way we used irc bots!
- RHSeeger 8y ago
  I find slack's search to be absolutely abysmal. If it at least logged to disk, I could grep/awk/sed it.
  - derefr 8y ago
    If you're a Slack admin, you can export a dump of the chat history. Such dumps are nominally for import into another group-chat system, but—given that the dump is just a tarball of newline-delimited JSON events, one file per channel—it's very easy to parse through in pretty much any language. And, of course, if you have a public Slack community, there's nothing stopping you from taking regular dumps and baking them into one-per-day HTML pages, and then putting the HTML files up somewhere where Google can find and index them...

zafiro17 8y ago

This was a cool project - I'm impressed. Just wanted to point out that http://topicbox.com http://topicbox.com offers similar functionality. Topicbox won't interface with Slack but rather replaces it. Run by the folks who do Fastmail, it's a modification/upgrade of old mailing list functionality. If you can get your team to use it, you can do most of what you did with Slack over an email interface that also offers perpetual archiving. I checked it out as a solution for archiving important project emails late-arrival employees would need to read to understand a project. Topicbox and this are slightly different, but both solve the high-bandwidth/low-availability problem in a way. These products that require always-on internet connectivity on robust connections really tire me out.

senorsmile 8y ago
This looks perfect!
wootbeep 8y ago
Thanks for sharing Topicbox, that hadn't come across my radar. I've been pleased with Fastmail. I can see why it would be helpful for onboarding employees. That's an important use case. Having jumped on multiple teams mid-project, it's tough trying to review a Slack channel history to get context.

foobaw 8y ago

Have you heard of Front(https://frontapp.com/ https://frontapp.com/). I know it's not exactly the same but I think Front saw similar pain points :)

kimdotcom 8y ago

You should call it listserv.

r00k 8y ago

If you're having Slack fatigue and a less interruptive approach sounds appealing, a friend is working on something you might like: https://level.app https://level.app.

senorsmile 8y ago
And its open source. Thanks for the share.

goatherders 8y ago

I hate slack with the fire of a thousand suns. That's all.

exotree 8y ago

As a full-time remote worker in a primarily office-based environment, Slack has been my main reason for success in working across teams.

katheriin 8y ago

Imagine, there's an app with Slack's functionality that already has such interop with email as you've built here :) Fleep: https://fleep.io/ https://fleep.io/ Anyone who does not want the group chat experience can be included in conversations via email. Currently, that does mean getting all messages via email, and not @mentions (nice idea, worth considering for Fleep's product team). But idea is similar: Full disclosure: I do work at marketing in Fleep :)