Slack buys Astro and closes its email application

Slack has purchased Astro, the creator of a messaging app with a built-in intelligent assistant that has helped sort your messages and raise important items to your attention.

It may seem odd that Slack, the giant chat application for the purpose of killing emails, buys an email application, but pairing is quite logical. Astro has focused on business users and has integrated some smart integrations into Slack. With both teams combined, Slack can use Astro's experience to create a native solution for processing email directly into the chat application.

There is however bad news: Slack closes the Astro mail application. The application will stop working on October 10th. It's a shame, as good third-party mail clients have become increasingly difficult to find, and Astro has features that have made it stand out.

The fact that Slack closes the Astro application clearly indicates where this acquisition is going. It seems less than Slack plans to launch an email application of its own and more, as Slack plans to include ways to work with your email in his chat application. This could include basic e-mail management, but the real key would be features that allow you to collaborate on your e-mails: you will get a correct answer by using a thread instead of a reply to a string. all for internal messages There.

Slack has not announced any details yet, but this suggests that this is the way to go. "We have taken steps to enable the integration of email in Slack, but we are now able to make this interoperability much simpler and much more powerful," the company writes.

Slack and Astro were both interested in business users, and they were particularly aware of the support for third-party services such as Salesforce that companies use to manage customer interactions. Salesforce and similar services could already integrate with Slack, but they are often based on email. And since email will not really go away, Slack tries to bring the experience inside his chat application to make it easier to manage.

There is no timeline on when one of these e-mail features will start arriving at Slack. But with the Astro team on board, it's clear they're a priority.