Skip to content
agentscamp
Tool

Slack MCP Server

The community-canonical Slack MCP server — smart history fetch, message search, channels, reactions, and opt-in posting, after the official server was archived.

open sourcemcp
Updated Jun 11, 2026
mcpslackchatworkflowcommunication
Visit website Source
View as Markdown

Anthropic's reference Slack server was archived in 2025; korotovsky/slack-mcp-server (MIT, v1.3+) is the maintained community standard. Seventeen tools: smart history fetch with 1d/7d/30d windows, message and thread search, channel listings, reactions, user-group management, and unread tracking — with message posting disabled by default and enabled per-channel via env vars.

Slack is where the context lives — decisions, incident threads, the answer someone posted three weeks ago. The Slack MCP Server makes it retrievable mid-task: the agent searches messages, reads thread history with sensible pagination, and (only if you opt in) posts updates back.

Highlights

  • Smart history fetch — conversations_history/conversations_replies with 1d/7d/30d windows or message counts, built to keep context small instead of dumping channels raw.
  • Search that understands Slack — message search with thread and DM filters (conversations_search_messages), plus #channel and @user name resolution with caching.
  • Posting is opt-in — conversations_add_message is disabled by default, enabled via env var, optionally restricted per channel.
  • Workspace plumbing — channel listings, reactions add/remove, user search, user-group management, unread tracking.
  • Three auth modes — user OAuth token (xoxp, full capability), bot token (xoxb, no search), or browser-session tokens (xoxc/xoxd) for locked-down workspaces.

In an AI-assisted workflow

claude mcp add slack --env SLACK_MCP_XOXP_TOKEN=xoxp-your-token \
  -- npx -y slack-mcp-server@latest --transport stdio
# then:
# > Find the #incidents thread about the payments outage last week and
# > summarize the root cause and action items into the postmortem doc

The high-value pattern is Slack as retrieval, docs as destination: pull the decision out of the thread, land it somewhere durable (pairs well with Notion MCP).

WARNING

A user-token server reads what you can read — DMs included — and feeds it to the model. Scope the Slack app's token to the minimum scopes in its docs, leave posting disabled until you need it, and treat browser-session tokens (scraped from a logged-in session) as the credentials they are. Worth a pass from claude-settings-auditor if it's going in a shared config.

Good to know

MIT, actively maintained (v1.3.0 landed May 2026 with a tool-permission matrix), distributed via npm and Docker, with stdio, SSE, and HTTP transports plus a Claude Desktop extension. Tool availability tracks your token type — search needs a non-bot token, unread/saved-items work best with browser tokens — so pick the auth mode by the capabilities you actually need.

Frequently asked questions

What happened to the official Slack MCP server?
It was archived with most reference servers in 2025 — src/slack now lives read-only in modelcontextprotocol/servers-archived. The ecosystem consolidated on korotovsky/slack-mcp-server, an MIT community project that goes well beyond the reference server's feature set.
How do I add the Slack MCP server to Claude Code?
With a Slack user OAuth token: claude mcp add slack --env SLACK_MCP_XOXP_TOKEN=xoxp-... -- npx -y slack-mcp-server@latest --transport stdio. Bot tokens (xoxb) work with reduced capability (no message search), and a browser-session mode (xoxc/xoxd) exists for workspaces where you can't create an app.
Can the agent post messages to Slack?
Only if you switch it on. The conversations_add_message tool ships disabled by default and is enabled via an env var, optionally restricted to specific channels — a sensible default for a tool that speaks as you.

Related