Send private message to someone via automation

[Marika_Vallier]

Hi there!
I am trying to send personal & private reminder messages via Slack to people in my team.
For that, I created automation and would now like to add a dynamic (colleague+me) channel ID which is connected to their name and therefore allows me to also put a dynamic (personalized) greeting.
However, I am not managing to get the automation working. Is it possible at all? Do you have any tips on hand?

Please don’t hesitate to ask questions in case it is not 100% clear, I am conscious that I am having a hard time describing my issue.

!

[ScottWorld]

What error message are you getting?

I haven’t tested this myself yet, but I think you can just send it to their email address within Slack (i.e. put their email address in the Channel/User field), and it should automatically create a private message to them.

Otherwise, you might need to put the # symbol before the conversation ID.

This support article is missing lots of information, but it might contain something helpful for you somewhere within the article:

support.airtable.com

How to Setup Slack Message Actions | Airtable Support

When building an Automation, you may choose the "Send a Slack message" action. When the automation runs successfully a...

[Marika_Vallier]

Thanks @ScottWorld !

A lot of our engineers are not very active via email so I would prefer to send a Slack message. Or did you mean the email would connect to a Slack message?

I have tried adding the #, but it didn’t work either.

Attached is the error message I am getting.

[ScottWorld]

Yes, what I meant is to insert the email address as the channel name. See if that works.

[Marika_Vallier]

Yes, it works, but it only sends a Slackbot message which does not attract as much attention as a private message and also doesn’t leave the opportunity for them to reply back directly.

[Marika_Vallier]

By the way, I figured that the numbers appeared because I set “length of channel”. But I had tried “value” before, and it still didn’t work…

[ScottWorld]

Ah, good to know about the Slackbot sending the message! Thanks for letting me know about that. Yeah, that’s not very helpful.

Are you putting the right conversation ID into your Channel field? Like you said, don’t use the length of channel, put the actual ID of the conversation.