Thrilled to see my friends at Astro launch (get it? okay, nm) Astrobot for Slack! Astrobot for Slack helps you stay on top of the most important messages in your Inbox **from inside Slack.** I use Astro’s Priority Inbox feature to help filter what messages are important for me to see and respond to.
Astro also makes it easy to share messages (and attachments!) from Astro’s native apps with your teammates in a Slack channel or DM. And you can even search your Slack Channels and DMs right alongside your email from within Astro. It’s a pretty slick pairing if you use Email and Slack a lot. Which is probably still most of us. Oh, and Astrobot works with Alexa too!
Excited about this drop. If you haven’t tried Astro yet, go grab the native macOS, iOS, or Android app and give it a spin.
@andrewwarner Key topic....We outline this in our Privacy & Security FAQ, https://help.helloastro.com/faq/..., and our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. But briefly we (a) don't ask for or have any passwords for your mail accounts (we have you auth directly with Gmail or Office 365), (b) encrypt data while in transit, and while stored in our service in AWS (c) don't have any humans view your data, unless we request to and get your explicit permission such as for troubleshooting an issue you've reported, (d) don't sell access to any user data; (e) delete your data from our service upon your request through the app or if you email us asking us to do so.
🙏 Thanks for checking us out, and a special thanks to Josh Williams for Hunting us. We’ll be here all day answering questions and responding to feedback.
Here's a bit more (well kind of a lot more) about what we're launching today:
For those of you who 💜 Slack as much as we do, you probably use it side by side with email, and it’s likely a bit of a pain to switch back and forth and remember where information lives. We want to solve this problem, so we built a DEEP integration between email and Slack. It’s launching today, all you need is a Gmail or Office 365 email address to get started.
💌 🤖 More about Astro and Astrobot
Let’s back up...a few months ago we launched Astro Email for Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Android. While our email apps are a great starting place for helping you focus on what’s most important in your inbox, we built Astro with a bigger vision in mind. We created our AI-powered chatbot, Astrobot, with the intention of bringing it to other tools you use to help you stay on top of what’s important.
#️⃣ 💌 🤖 Astrobot in Slack AND Slack integration in Astro
Slack is an obvious place for us to bring Astrobot. If you work out of Slack, Astrobot will help you can stay on top of your most important without leaving the app. But, some people still spend a lot of time in email, so we also added Slack functionality to our email apps to help information flow freely between Astro’s Email Apps and Slack.
🚀 Here’s what we launched:
ASTROBOT IN SLACK
* Email notifications: Get notified about Priority emails, or every new email, in Slack
* Manage your inbox from Slack: Take actions on emails without leaving Slack: Send, Reply, Archive, Delete, Snooze, or Star emails
* Astrobot insights & reminders: Get reminders about important emails and questions you may have missed
SLACK INTEGRATION IN ASTRO EMAIL
* Universal Search: Do a single search in the Astro search bar, and get results from Slack and email
* Share Emails to Slack: Send emails and/or attachments directly to a Slack Channel or DM
#️⃣ Connect Slack
If you want to use Astro Email and Slack together, download our apps at helloastro.com, then go to preferences on Mac or Settings on mobile to connect an account.
If you just want to add Astrobot to Slack to manage your inbox from Slack, go to helloastro.com/slack and connect your email and Slack team.
🎤 Bot, that’s not all...
We’ve brought Astrobot to Amazon Alexa too, so you can manage your inbox hands-free. Visit helloastro.com/alexa to connect your Gmail or Office 365 account.
@emilykramer that would be fantastic , I've more than 1 email address for work and that would be awesome to have all emails from different address show up in slack . Great job by the way :)
@lkkwus For the future, working on ways to allow more, support other email addresses beyond Gmail and Office 365, and thinking about group email addresses too.
Slack integration is so awesome! And the Alexa integration means cleaning my kitchen, aka working from home, is more efficient than ever. Keep up the amazing work :)
At first, I thought Astrobot was kind of a gimmick, but there are a few things it does which have been helpful:
1) VIP promotion: noting which people are VIP and asking if I'd like them included is great, because I always struggle to know who should be in the list.
2) Question prompts: Astrobot surfaces emails which look like a question, which prompts me to respond to ones that seem more urgent.
3) Unsubscribe from continually deleted/archived messages: Astro recommends which e-mail subscriptions you don't want to see. This one has promise but doesn't always work... usually I get thrown to a page that requires another step. The dream would be automatic unsubscribe and no browser window. One plus is that it also offers to archive all e-mails from the sender -- a nice touch.
In general, I think Astro is a brilliant use of machine learning for a very data-rich problem. I think the UI is too heavy handed, and I'd kind of like a little more tightness around messages and the sidebar to be collapsable, but this app itself is solid.
Big fan of Astro Mail and the Astrobot! The latest update seems like a very good move indeed, I'm sure people will enjoy the slack integration!
But what about us poor bastards who work for companies that are aggressively pursuing an Office365 strategy? Are there similar integrations in the works for MS Teams?
@henrik_lenerius We're starting with Slack, but are definitely going to be building more integrations and feedback like this is great. We're supporting Office 365 emails, and definitely want to provide alternatives/improvements for those using Outlook, MS Teams, etc.
Gowalla - The Social Map