Slack Finds New Ways to Fit In at the Office, Ahead of Stock Debut

Slack Technologies Inc. built a tool that, at its best, eliminates the flood of emails among coworkers and replaces it with … a flood of short messages, emojis and animated GIFs. In every office, there are always some holdouts who aren’t ready to let email go and embrace this new world order.

So Slack is developing ways to let those resisters—or, for example, new hires still getting set up in the system—exchange messages with Slack loyalists from the comfort of their inboxes. With the new tool, called an “email bridge,” Slack users will be able to send and receive emails with colleagues from within the chat software. It resolves a major drawback some employers experience when testing Slack, an important change for the company as it prepares to soon start selling its shares to the public.