Slack MCP Server: read channels, search messages, triage unreads

Back from vacation to dozens of unread channels, or trying to find what last month’s incident thread finally decided: scrolling Slack by hand takes ages. korotovsky’s Slack MCP Server lets an agent do the reading. It pulls history and threads by channel name or @username, searches by person, date and channel, and sorts your unreads by priority. It’s written in Go and speaks stdio, SSE and HTTP.

What it does

• History: conversations_history and conversations_replies page through channels, DMs, group DMs and threads by time window (1d, 7d, 30d) or message count.
• Search: conversations_search_messages filters by channel, DM partner, sender, date and threads-only, or fetches a single message from its URL.
• Unread triage: lists unreads with DMs first, then partner channels, then internal ones, optionally only @mentions, and can mark them read.
• Cautious writes: posting (conversations_add_message), reactions and mark-as-read are all off until you enable them with environment variables, optionally limited to specific channel IDs.
• Enterprise options: Enterprise Grid, GovSlack, proxies and custom TLS settings.

Who it’s for

• Engineering managers and on-call engineers who follow a dozen channels and want a first-pass summary.
• Teams writing decision logs or postmortems from Slack history.

Setup

Needs Node.js and a Slack token. With a user OAuth token (xoxp-):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "slack": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "slack-mcp-server@latest", "--transport", "stdio"],
      "env": {
        "SLACK_MCP_XOXP_TOKEN": "xoxp-..."
      }
    }
  }
}

A bot token (SLACK_MCP_XOXB_TOKEN) also works, but only sees channels it’s invited to and can’t search.

Our take

About 1,900 stars as of 2026-10-06. The Slack server from MCP’s original reference repo has been archived, and this community project is now the most capable and best documented option. Its defaults are sensible: every write tool is off, and when you turn one on you can allow-list channels. The part that needs a warning is its advertised “stealth mode”, which uses xoxc/xoxd session tokens lifted from your browser to skip app installation and scopes. At many companies that breaks IT policy, it may break Slack’s terms, and a leaked token is as good as a stolen account. Use an OAuth token for real work and tell your workspace admin. The last push was in July 2026, a slower pace than earlier in the year. Licensed MIT.