Rules are one of the most powerful features of Dispatch that let you use a comprehensive set of conditions to automatically triage messages as they come in.

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Open the Rules modal by clicking the arrows icon in the bottom left corner of Dispatch, or with the “Open Rules” command in the command palette [⌘P].

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Default Inboxes

The Rules modal lets you update or bulk-update the default inboxes of your channels.

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Inboxes

Custom rules

The bottom half of the Rules modal contains custom rules.

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Each custom rule has a set of conditions and a set of actions. If an incoming message matches the conditions, then the actions will run. Otherwise, the rule will be skipped.

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You’ll start off with one custom rule by default that you can use as an example. This rule checks for messages containing @mentions or @channels, and moves those messages to your Important inbox, marks them not done, and unmutes them.

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Rule order

The order of the rules matter because the actions of later rules may overwrite the actions of earlier rules.

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Use the up and down arrows to the right of each custom rule to reorder them.

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Example rules

Here are a few example rules to give you an idea for what’s possible. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you’d like help setting up some rules of your own!

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Client channels

At Dispatch we communicate with customers through Slack Connect channels that are named #[company name]-dispatch. For example, Acme Inc.’s channel would be named #acme-dispatch.

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Most of us have an inbox called “Clients” that we route all client messages to with the following rule:

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Keywords

You can elevate the priority of messages containing certain key words with the “message contains text” condition. Here’s an example of a rule that looks out for my name, my initials, or ice cream and elevates the message to my Important inbox:

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Mute bot spam

You can do something similar to the keyword search above to deprioritize certain messages, like from bots. Here’s a rule that looks for Jira bot notifications of actions that I’ve performed myself, and marks them done immediately. Note the use of “condition groups” to group several conditions together:

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Assign my client’s messages to me

Messages in channels for clients that I manage should be immediately assigned to me, which can be accomplished with a rule like this: