I hate how Slack’s Activity and Catch Up features work, so I built Dispatch, an opinionated and focused inbox for Slack. Sort of like Superhuman for Slack — never miss an important message, and triage your inbox quickly.
- Add your Slack cookie so it can connect to your workspace. Everything happens locally.
- Choose what messages you want brought into Dispatch. Mentions are included by default. You can additionally specify people or channels. For example, I have people I work most closely with and senior execs listed, along with a few whole-company channels I know might be relevant.
- All the messages imported by the above will be categorized into split inboxes or categories, based either on simple keywords (e.g.
from:@Mattshould be filtered into the Important inbox) or, optionally, with Claude Haiku using a prompt you can configure. If you choose to enable Claude, you’ll effectively have a little assistant categorizing each message into a bucket based on your description. - Go through each inbox. Star, snooze, or mark messages as done with keyboard shortcuts. Hit enter to read more or reply in Slack directly.
This lets you treat Slack just like email. Messages come in, get filtered into inboxes, and then you can action them quickly.
The design is inspired by Superhuman Mail, as well as a now-defunct alternative Slack client I used and loved called Ripcord. Dispatch is typography-heavy and very dense, with inspiration and guidance from Matthew Butterick’s Practical Typography, which argues that typography (font size, spacing, and density) are the primary interface of any text-heavy app. Dispatch uses SF Pro at 13px with tight row heights so you can scan dozens of messages without wasted space, and lets you switch to monospace or adjust sizes from 11–18px, because good typography respects the reader’s context. Just enough structure to let you read fast and act.
There are probably definitely bugs, but I’ve been using it for the past few days and it’s helped cut through a lot of the noise on Slack. Give it a try and let me know what you think!
Why build a Slack client? For years, I’ve been fed up with how Slack treats channels, messages, and threads. Channels are too noisy, important context gets lost in threads, the Activity view captures a subset of actionable items, and notifications often don’t fire. And seemingly most of the internet agrees with me:
If someone doesn’t @-mention you or the channel, the only way you’ll see that message is to read every message, in every channel, every day. For orgs with hundreds of channels, it’s a mess.
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