Messaging
We're still building and not all features are available quite yet. Enjoy this peek into the future!
Not ready for the future? Return to the past at api.slack.com.
Messages are at the core of how you communicate in Slack. They have many shapes and sizes and varying levels of complexity. They can exist merely to notify, or they can invite and await response.
The core functionality of most Slack apps will involve the publication or consumption of messages. In this overview, we give you a quick trip through the basics of doing these things and an introduction to the terminology that surrounds messaging.
The mechanics of messaging
There can be a huge variation in how messages appear. For example, this is a message:
And so is this:
At a basic level, messages are a series of attributes which describe and contain content.
Slack apps can publish new messages, and retrieve or modify existing ones.
Workflow automations can also send messages with a variety of built-in Slack functions.
Both types of apps have access to a range of formatting and interactivity options for controlling the look and feel of messages. You can read the overview guides for those topics to get a better sense of what is possible, but for now let's learn about the environment that messages exist in.
Conversations
In Slack, messages inhabit conversations. A