How to Manage Slack Notifications

How Slack notifications work

By default, Slack sends notifications to both your desktop and your phone (if you have the mobile app installed). What triggers a notification depends on three layers of settings:

• Your global preferences. These set the baseline for every channel: all new messages, only direct messages, mentions and keywords, or nothing.
• Channel-level overrides. Any channel can be set louder or quieter than your default, or muted entirely.
• Timing and delivery. Notification schedules, pausing notifications, mobile settings, and email notifications decide when and where you hear about something.

If you're getting too many notifications, the fix is usually a quieter global default plus a few channel overrides, not turning everything off.

How to change your Slack notification settings

1. Click your profile picture and select Preferences (or press Ctrl+, on Windows, Cmd+, on Mac).
2. Select Notifications.
3. Under Notify me about, choose one:
   • All new messages – every message in every channel you're in. Rarely the right choice outside very small teams.
   • Direct messages, mentions & keywords – the best default for most people.
   • Nothing – silences everything except what you set up separately.

1. Decide whether you want notifications for replies to threads you follow.
2. Pick a notification sound, or turn sounds off.

Changes save automatically. Start with "Direct messages, mentions & keywords," then turn specific channels up if you find you're missing things.

Channel-level notifications and muting

Your global setting is a starting point. Individual channels can be tuned up or down:

1. Open the channel and click its name at the top.
2. Find the notification settings for that channel.
3. Choose All new posts, Mentions, or Nothing, or mute the channel.

A few rules of thumb:

• Turn up the handful of channels where every message matters, like an on-call or incident channel.
• Mute channels you check on your own schedule, like announcements, social channels, or bot feeds. Muted channels stay in your sidebar, dimmed, and won't badge unless you're mentioned.
• Leave channels you don't need at all. Muting hides the noise; leaving removes it.

If you find yourself muting the same channels over and over, that's often a sign the workspace has more channels than it needs. More on that below.

Keywords, schedules, mobile, and email

Once your global and channel settings are in place, these four features do most of the fine-tuning. All of them live under Preferences > Notifications.

Keyword notifications. Add words or phrases, like your product name, a client name, or a project code, and Slack will notify you when they appear in any channel you're in. This lets you keep busy channels quiet without missing the conversations that involve you.

Notification schedule. Set the days and hours you want notifications. Outside that window, Slack holds them. For a one-off break, use Pause notifications to silence Slack for a set amount of time.

Mobile notifications. You can match your desktop settings or set different rules for your phone. A common setup: desktop gets mentions and keywords, mobile gets direct messages only. You can also have Slack wait to send mobile notifications until you've been inactive on desktop for a while, so you don't get the same ping twice.

Email notifications. If you're away from Slack, it can email you about unread mentions and DMs. You can choose how often (for example, every 15 minutes or once an hour) or turn emails off.

The admin side: notification noise starts with channel sprawl

Individual settings only go so far. If your workspace has hundreds of channels, every user ends up muting, leaving, and filtering the same clutter on their own.

Much of that clutter is inactive channels: old projects, finished campaigns, and one-time groups that nobody closed. They still show up in search and the channel browser. When someone posts in one by mistake, it pings a dozen people who forgot they were members.

Archiving those channels removes them from the conversation without losing their history. Once a channel is archived, members stop getting notifications from it entirely (here's what else changes). Fewer live channels means fewer places for notifications to come from, for everyone.

The hard part is knowing which channels are actually dead, and doing it without archiving something a team still relies on.

Notifications that work for Slack admins

Slack's notification settings are built for individual users. They tell you when someone mentions you. They don't tell an admin when a new app gets installed, when a channel goes quiet for 90 days, or when someone pastes a password into a public channel.

That's the gap Chronicle fills. Chronicle is a Slack admin tool that sends alerts straight into Slack, so admins hear about what matters without watching every channel:

• Event monitoring. Get alerted in Slack for more than 25 workspace events, such as new users, new apps, channels being archived, and file changes.
• Message monitoring. Flag messages that contain credit card numbers, passwords, profanity, or your own custom patterns.
• Inactive channel notifications. Instead of the admin deciding alone, Chronicle notifies the members of an inactive channel and lets them choose whether it should be archived.
• Scheduled inactive channel reports. Get a daily, weekly, or monthly report in Slack showing how many channels have gone inactive.

The result is fewer notifications for your team, because dead channels get cleaned up, and better notifications for admins, because the alerts are about things that actually need action.