Slack – Is It Possible to View the Read Status of a Message?

slack

Sometimes I want to know if a specific person has seen a message yet without having to Direct Message them. Is it possible to see read-status in Slack? How?

Best Answer

Unfortunately there is no read receipt feature, although it is on their dev backlog according to this Tweet thread.

There isn't much you can do outside of asking if they saw it. Some other possibilities:

Look at their screen to see if their Slack app is showing the unread message notification. This isn't perfect though. You'll know they read it if the notification isn't there, but they may have also seen it even with the notification showing, due to other unread messages.
If they are offline when you message them, wait around to see if they appear online shortly after you send the message. That is a likely indication that they read it. Having said that, it might be possible that a user's account is "sleeping" and the act of receiving the message sets them as online. You can test this with someone that has the Slack app on their phone. Have them login and leave the app alone for some time. Once they no longer appear online, send them a message and see of they come online without having to reopen the app.

Related Solutions

Slack – Reading Slack updates across multiple channels

Slack has launched a new feature just for you "View all unreads". Works only on desktop client for now.

Slack – Efficiently Archive Channels

To actually "slack-archive" the channels, ie the equivalent of running "/archive" within each channel, you'll need some API magic.

First, set up an API token for your user in the relevant team on https://api.slack.com/custom-integrations/legacy-tokens, then go to https://api.slack.com/methods/channels.list/test to get a json-listing of your channels together with the channel ids.

Then use these channel ids to run https://api.slack.com/methods/channels.archive/test for the channels you want to archive.

Here is a quick and dirty bash script (which uses jq) I recently ran on my Mac in order to archive the hundreds of channels that contained "sk-" in the channel name:

TOKEN="replace-this-with-your-user-api-token-in-the-relevant-team"
curl "https://slack.com/api/channels.list?token=$TOKEN&exclude_archived=true&pretty=1" > /tmp/channels.list
IDS=$(cat /tmp/channels.list | jq '.channels[] | select(.name | contains("sk-")) | .id' | sed -e 's/"//g')
for ID in $IDS; do
    URL="https://slack.com/api/channels.archive?token=$TOKEN&channel=$ID&pretty=1"
    echo $URL
    curl "$URL"
done

It got the job done, archiving about 2-3 channels per second.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Slack – Reading Slack updates across multiple channels

Slack – Efficiently Archive Channels

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