Find messages in Slack based on a date or date range

I often find myself needing to find a conversation that happened on a specific date in Slack but can't remember keywords from the conversation or who all was in the conversation.

Here are two quick ways to find a conversation in Slack based on a known date or date range.

Jump to date via UI

I can usually remember around the time something happened (or use GitHub merge information) and I'll want to find a conversation that happened in Slack around it.

There's an easy way to Jump to date within a channel or direct message:

• Open the channel or direct message where you want to jump to date
• Find any date in the channel or direct message
• Click it
• Select Jump to a specific date
• This will give you a date picker
• Select the date (or around the date) you want

Search all messages in all channels or direct messages by range

If you can't quite remember which channel or specific day a conversation happened but remember it happened within a range, you can use Slack's Search feature.

Let's say you remember you had a conversation in the first week of July of 2022.

• select the search bar in the top of the Slack UI
• type after:2022-07-01 before:2022-07-05 and hit enter

This will return all results after July 1st and before July 5th.