
Designing an email-only Slack interface - luu
https://kevinlynagh.com/stop-slacking/
======
lynaghk
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.

~~~
fouc
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.

~~~
wootbeep
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.

------
matchbok
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
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.

~~~
RHSeeger
I find slack's search to be absolutely abysmal. If it at least logged to disk,
I could grep/awk/sed it.

~~~
derefr
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...

~~~
u801e
> 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...

Is there a reason why Slack doesn't just have a setting that enables logging
to a local file on disk?

------
hultner
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.

~~~
llampx
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
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
Didn't stop them from disabling the official IRC gateway they had.

~~~
arjun27
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)

------
Rjevski
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
Totally agree. The intent may be for good but this is the textbook example of
"how not to acquire sensitive information".

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

~~~
paulie_a
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.

~~~
Rjevski
Auto-generated emails are not the fault of email itself. Just avoid signing up
for shit and if you _need_ to sign up then take 5 minutes to visit your
account settings on that platform and uncheck any notifications/spam-letters
you don't care about.

I personally have only one or two auto-generated emails a week, at most, and
all of those actually require my attention (expired credit card, etc). The
other ones are either disabled or filtered away at the server level before
they even reach my client (thanks to rules in Office 365).

> I wish voicemail could be an opt out thing, I haven't listened to a message
> in a decade.

Does your carrier not provide it? Here in the UK every single carrier allows
it. If not, try the following USSD codes - the "cancel & deregister" ones:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_forwarding#Mobile_(cell)_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_forwarding#Mobile_\(cell\)_phones)

------
arjenschat
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 :)

~~~
cryath
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.

------
testfailure
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)

------
zafiro17
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.

~~~
wootbeep
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.

------
cncrnd
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.

------
katheriin
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 :)

------
isaack
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
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.

------
arjun27
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)

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

------
r00k
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
And its open source. Thanks for the share.

------
foobaw
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 :)

------
chiefalchemist
> "...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.

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

------
kimdotcom
You should call it listserv.

