Slack's Message Management is a Nightmare

After years of using Slack across multiple workspaces, I've come to a frustrating conclusion: Slack's message and conversation management is fundamentally broken. What should be basic functionality is either missing entirely or artificially restricted.

The Delete Rate Limit Problem

Want to clean up your DM history? Delete some old messages you no longer need? Good luck.

Slack aggressively rate limits message deletions. Try to delete more than a handful of messages in quick succession and you'll hit a wall:

You are being rate limited. Please try again later.

There's no official documentation on what these limits are. Users have reported getting locked out after deleting as few as 5-10 messages in a minute. The rate limit can last anywhere from a few minutes to hours.

This means if you want to clean up a conversation with hundreds or thousands of messages, you're looking at:

  • Days or weeks of manual deletion
  • Writing a script that respects arbitrary, undocumented rate limits
  • Third-party tools that cost money and require OAuth access to your workspace

Why does this limit exist? Slack claims it's to "prevent abuse" and "protect server resources." But let's be real - you're not DDoSing their servers by deleting your own messages. This is a design choice that prioritizes Slack's data retention over user control.

You Can Never Actually Leave a Conversation

Here's something that drives me insane: there is no way to permanently leave a direct message conversation in Slack.

When you click the "X" to close a conversation, you might think you're leaving it. You're not. You're just hiding it from your sidebar. The conversation still exists. You're still a member of it.

The moment someone sends a new message to that conversation, it pops right back into your sidebar like it never left. There's no "Leave conversation" option. No "Delete conversation" option. Nothing.

This means your conversation count only ever goes up. Every DM, every group DM, every casual "hey can you check this" message thread - they all accumulate forever. You cannot reduce this number. You can only hide conversations temporarily.

The Phantom Conversation Problem

Because closing a conversation doesn't actually remove you from it, you end up with phantom conversations everywhere:

  • That group DM from 3 years ago with people who don't even work at the company anymore? Still there.
  • The 47 one-off conversations with random coworkers about things long resolved? All still there.
  • That awkward DM chain you'd rather forget? Permanently attached to your account.

Your "All DMs" list becomes an archaeological dig of every interaction you've ever had. And there's nothing you can do about it except scroll past them forever.

Why This Matters

"Just ignore it," you might say. But this isn't just about aesthetics:

  1. Search pollution: Every search query returns results from conversations you thought you left years ago.

  2. Privacy concerns: You have no control over your own message history. Even if you delete your messages one by one (at a glacial rate-limited pace), the conversation metadata remains.

  3. Workspace bloat: Admins have no good tools to clean up orphaned conversations or help users manage their DM sprawl.

  4. Cognitive load: A cluttered conversation list is a cluttered mind. There's real value in being able to close out completed threads.

What Slack Should Do

The fixes here are obvious:

  1. Remove or significantly raise delete rate limits for users deleting their own messages. If I want to nuke my entire DM history, that's my choice.

  2. Add a real "Leave Conversation" option that actually removes you from the conversation, not just hides it.

  3. Add bulk message management - select multiple messages, delete them all at once.

  4. Conversation archival - let users archive old DMs so they don't pollute search and the conversation list.

The Uncomfortable Truth

The cynical take is that Slack doesn't want you to delete messages because:

  • More data = more value for their AI features
  • More data = more lock-in (good luck migrating away)
  • More data = more leverage in enterprise sales ("we retain everything!")

Your conversation history isn't a bug, it's a feature - just not for you.

My Solution: nuke-slack

I got tired of waiting for Slack to fix this, so I built a tool to handle it myself.

nuke-slack is a Python script that deletes all of your own messages from Slack workspaces. It handles:

  • All conversation types - public channels, private channels, group DMs, and direct messages
  • Only your messages - it won't touch anyone else's messages
  • Rate limiting - automatically handles Slack's API limits so you don't get blocked
  • Resume support - tracks processed conversations so you can pick up where you left off if interrupted
git clone https://github.com/sek3b/nuke-slack.git
cd nuke-slack
pip install requests
# Add your OAuth token to config.json
python3 nuke-slack.py

You'll need a Slack User OAuth Token with the appropriate permissions. Check the repo README for the full setup instructions.

Is it annoying that we need third-party tools to manage our own data? Absolutely. But until Slack decides user control matters, this is what we've got.

If Slack ever adds proper message management, I'll happily eat my words. But after 10+ years of the platform existing, I'm not optimistic.