Chat with Mail, Calendar and Meetings

Chat lives in the same app as your company mailbox, your calendar, SingleSign Meetings and Documents, and it works with each of them. A meeting gets a chat that's still there after the call, an email can be brought into a conversation to talk it over, a message can go out as an email, a document can be shared straight from Documents, and your status can follow your calendar. For the basics of Chat, see Chat: getting started.

Meeting chats

Every meeting on your calendar with other people from your organization can have its own meeting chat: a conversation for the agenda before the call, the links shared during it and the follow-ups after it. Unlike the chat inside a call, it doesn't disappear when the call ends.

Who's in it: the organizer and the attendees who have a company mailbox in your organization. People from outside your organization are never members. When someone is added to or removed from the event, the meeting chat follows: a removed attendee loses access.
One chat per meeting: everyone invited sees the same meeting chat. A recurring meeting keeps a single chat for the whole series, so last week's notes are still there next week.
Where to find it: meeting chats are listed under Meetings in the Chat sidebar, titled after the event, with its time. Its header says "Meeting chat · only invited people in your organization".
Private: a meeting chat never appears in Browse channels, and it never shows up in search for anyone who isn't in it.

A meeting chat is created the first time someone opens it. A meeting you started with a meeting code and no calendar event gets a meeting chat too: its members are the person who owns the meeting and the people from your organization who joined the call.

Open meeting chat

From Calendar: open the event and click Open meeting chat in its details. If you aren't one of the event's attendees from your organization, Calendar says so instead of opening it.
From the call: open the chat panel in SingleSign Meetings. Above the live messages, Earlier in the meeting chat shows what was said before, and Open chat opens the meeting chat in a new tab, so you don't leave the call.

What happens to messages in the call

People in your organization: when they're signed in, what they write in the call's chat panel is also saved to the meeting chat, under their name. The panel says so: "Messages from people in your organization are also saved to the meeting chat."
Guests keep today's in-call chat: their messages are seen only by the people in the call and are never saved to the meeting chat.

Recordings

When someone records the meeting, the meeting chat gets a note when the recording finishes, for example "Ana recorded this meeting". The note has no link: a recording stays private to the person who made it.

Discuss in Chat

Want your colleagues' take on an email? Open it in Mail and click Discuss in Chat in the reading pane. Pick where it goes: a recent conversation, a channel or person you search for, or a new group DM with the people from your organization on the email's To and Cc. Add a note if you like, and share.

The conversation gets a message with an email card showing:

the subject, from and date, and
a short excerpt of the text, up to 500 characters, as plain text: images, remote content and formatting are stripped.

The original email is attached to the message as an .eml file, so members of the conversation can open the whole thing. It's downloaded as a file, never shown as a web page, and it counts against your storage. Your organization's audit log records that you shared it.

You can only share email from your own mailbox. Mail in Spam, and mail from senders you screened out or haven't let in yet, can't be shared: the button isn't shown. See The Screener.

Discussing an email in Chat never sends an email to anyone.

It works the other way too. On any Chat message, open ⋯ and choose:

Share via email: opens a new email in Mail with the message filled in, for you to address and send. It's an ordinary email from your mailbox, so your usual sending limits apply. See Sending & Receiving.
Send to my inbox: emails the message to your own address only, so it lands in your inbox with the rest of your to-dos. Nobody else receives it.

Files from Documents

To share something from Documents, click the attach button in the composer and choose From Documents, or type @ and the start of a file's name. Both list the documents, Writer documents and spreadsheets you can open whose names match, up to 20 at a time.

A document keeps its own sharing: people open it with the access its owner gave them. So when you post a document that some people in the conversation may not be able to open, Chat first asks Share with members?, naming the conversation, for example "Share with #launch?":

Pick Can view or Can comment and click Share and send. Chat shares the document with each member of the conversation, then posts it.
Or click Send without sharing. People who can't open the document see only the link.
A conversation with more than 200 members is too big to share with one by one: share the document with your whole organization from its Share dialog instead. See Sharing, comments and version history.

Links to Writer documents, spreadsheets, Documents files, Chat messages and meetings show a preview card in the conversation. Each person sees the title only if they can open the item themselves; to everyone else it's just a link. See Chat: messages, threads, mentions and reactions.

Status from your calendar

Chat can set your status from your calendar, so people know why you're not answering:

Your calendar	Your status
A meeting you've accepted, with at least one other person, happening now	In a meeting · until it ends
An all-day or long event called something like "OOO", "PTO", "Out of office", "Vacation" or "Holiday"	Out of office · until it ends
You're in a SingleSign Meetings call	In a huddle

People see only the status, never your calendar: event titles are never shown. A status you set yourself always wins over the one from your calendar. It's on by default; turn it off in Preferences. See Chat: notifications, status and Do Not Disturb.