Anything accepts email - almost anything can send email. So for example in Aether Pro we’re building email pipelines so you can tie your CI to a ‘subreddit’ and all messages coming from that CI would appear under, without polluting everyone’s inboxes. It can also trigger further actions based on parsing those emails as well. It’s messy, but it’s the only thing that kind of works with anything.
We’d love to be able to rely on APIs of other tools, but those are just never there, or too fragile, or the API owners think the data they are ‘leaking’ is too valuable to let go, so email it is.
It's all in the context of providing an internal gathering space that isn't just a notification-heavy Slack channel. Reddit-style forums work surprisingly well for both humans and robots, so it's pretty nice.