Estate planning as a Slack account holder

Slack is a team messaging and collaboration platform operated by Slack Technologies, LLC, a Salesforce company. A Slack account signs a person into one or more workspaces, where conversations happen in channels and direct messages and files are shared. For estate purposes the asset that matters is rarely the individual account: it is the workspace the deceased may have owned. Each workspace has a single Primary Owner who controls billing, settings, and the workspace itself, while message history and files belong to the workspace and are governed by the organization's plan and its export and retention settings, not by any one member. An individual member's account is deactivated by a workspace admin; a workspace the deceased was Primary Owner of survives by transferring Primary Ownership to another owner or admin.

After a Slack account holder dies, Slack Technologies, LLC (Salesforce) may transfer accounts to a designated recipient, but this is handled case by case. The outcome depends on the documentation provided and is entirely at Slack Technologies, LLC (Salesforce)'s discretion.

accounts can be transferred to another person while the Slack account holder is alive.

What happens at death

Slack does not publish a single death policy, because the outcome depends on whether the deceased was a Primary Owner of a workspace or only a member. If the deceased was a Primary Owner, the workspace and its data and billing survive by transferring Primary Ownership to another owner or admin; Slack documents this as a deliberate, controlled transfer rather than an inheritance. Only the Primary Owner can initiate a transfer, and the new owner must already be a workspace member whose account uses an email on the company's domain (personal email addresses cannot receive ownership). When the Primary Owner has died or cannot be reached, a non-owner who is a senior staff member authorized to represent the legal entity that the workspace was created for can contact Slack Support to request the transfer; Slack reviews these requests, notes they may take time, and states they are not guaranteed to be approved. If the deceased was only a member, the relevant action is deactivation by a workspace admin: Slack states that when an account is deactivated, the member's messages and files are not deleted and remain in the workspace, the member is removed from all channels and signed out on all devices, and only a Workspace Primary Owner can later delete that deactivated member's profile information. Message history and files are workspace assets governed by the organization's plan and its export and retention settings, not individually inheritable.

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