How to reply to email from Slack

1. Slack's own forwarding plus your mail app (free)

Give the channel an email address (paid Slack plans) and forward your support address to it. The team sees every email in Slack and decides who answers. The answer itself is still written in Gmail or Outlook. This costs nothing and is fine for low volume.

2. A relay that sends your Slack reply as an email

Tools like RelayMail and SharedInbox turn each email into a Slack thread and send your thread reply back as an email. RelayMail works from a forwarding rule, so it never needs your mailbox password; SharedInbox connects your Gmail or Microsoft account. RelayMail is $15/month per inbox with a 14-day trial, and anyone in the channel can reply.

Setup with RelayMail: start the trial, connect a Slack channel, copy your RelayMail address, add it as a forwarding address in your mail provider, and click the confirmation link that shows up in Slack.

3. A help desk with a Slack front end

Unthread and ClearFeed run a full help desk inside Slack: tickets, assignment, SLAs and reporting, with email as one channel. They are priced per agent (ClearFeed lists $24 per agent per month; Unthread starts at $75 per agent per month with a five-seat minimum). Worth it once you need ticket metrics, more than you need for one shared address.

Slack also has its own case management for customer email, built on Salesforce Email-to-Case: email becomes a case in Slack and teammates reply with a Send email action. If your company already runs Salesforce, look at that first.

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