Supporting private channels and direct messages documents from slack

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

Hello,

The current slack connector does not support reading documents from private channels and direct messages when crawling the data into elastic. Elastic Slack connector reference | Reference

Is there a plan to provide an alternative way to do this?

Assuming the slack application is part of the private channel or some discovery API usage is be supported on the application side the reading part might be solvable but this might lead to more questions like how to handle permissions updates on documents when a user is added/removed to a private channel etc…

This sounds like a feature many users of the slack connectors might benefit from on the long run and even if slack is discouraging exporting data out of it to feed them in vector databases having a way of handling the permissions on the connector level might be good.

Also in case there is a fork of the slack connector that might be supporting this instead of using the default connector let me know.

Thank you

2

Hi @kenseii ,

At this time, there’s not a plan to modify that connector’s behavior. This is less because we don’t see the value, and more because, since the connector was built, Slack has changed their terms-of-service and their API rate limits to disallow/disincentivize pulling data en-mass from Slack. See news articles like: https://www.reuters.com/business/salesforce-blocks-ai-rivals-using-slack-data-information-reports-2025-06-11/

Instead, what you’re likely to see in the nearish future are some tools in the Elastic ecosystem that will allow for Federated Search of your slack data. This will hopefully meet your use case, of allowing users to search over data that appears in their private channels, with the added benefit that it won’t expose that private channel data to other Elastic users.

3

Hi @Sean_Story ,

Thank you for the clarification, about pulling data out of slack it is possible to get an exception from their end to allow a slack app to read data from there and store them somewhere else however this is on customer basis and it would not be a long term solution.

For the federated search, how would that work with elastic? is there going to be a connector that interfaces with federated search servers (i assume this will not be slack only)? is there any timeline on this feature or an open project that might need contributions from the community?

Thanks again for the reply