As part of its quest to replace email, Slack Technologies Inc. is embracing it.

The team chat giant today revealed that it has acquired Astro Technology Inc., a three-year-old email management startup based in San Francisco. Astro launched out of stealth mode in 2017 with an email client that featured a built-in virtual assistant, and later ported the underlying automation technology to Slack as a standalone chatbot offering.

Astrobot, as the product is called, enables users to manage emails directly in the chat interface. It packs a set of advanced features that lend themselves to much more than just viewing and replying to messages. A worker can have Astrobot remind them to answer an email at a later date, archive old items after a certain time period to keep their inbox organized and set alerts for important messages.

Yet the bot’s arguably most powerful feature is its integrated search function. Astrobot makes it possible to centrally sift through emails and chat messages centrally in the Slack window, which can be immensely helpful given that most workers use team chat services alongside rather than instead of platforms such as Gmail.

The bot’s centralized search could prove highly valuable for Slack due to the same reason. Enabling users to search emails via the native interface will reduce the amount of time they need to spend in their inboxes, which should ultimately strengthen Slack’s hold on office communications. As part of the same effort, the company has invested in expanding the capabilities of its platform’s built-in search tool.

Astro will discontinue its applications for Mac, iOS, Android, Amazon Alexa and Slack on Oct. 10. This means that the service will likely reappear sometime in the future as a native component of Slack, or perhaps as a premium offering geared toward enterprises.

The team chat provider is keeping mum about exactly what will happen with Astrobot in the wake of the acquisition. The only detail that Slack has divulged is that the deal represents its largest acquisition to date, although it didn’t share the financial terms.

Slack previously bought Atlassian Corp. PLC’s rival HipChat and Strike team chat services for an undisclosed sum in a deal aimed at migrating the users who relied on those products to its platform. A few days before that, the company acquired another application called Missions that lets workers create workflows for automating tasks such as collecting customer feedback.  

Photo: Slack