Reading Slack updates across multiple channels

Question

If I'm subscribed to 30 Slack channels and five of them have unread messages, does Slack have a feature where there's one place I can quickly read all unread posts without having to hunt for channels with unread messages and click on each one individually to read what's new?

More context: Our company just adopted Slack, and I'd like to find a more efficient way to catch up on messages across multiple channels. Before Slack, each of these conversations would have been in an email thread, which I could read all-at-once in my email application's inbox. I'm trying to figure out an equivalently efficient workflow now that these conversations are happening on Slack.

Answer 1

Slack has launched a new feature just for you "View all unreads". Works only on desktop client for now.

Answer 2

Here's a little trick I discovered: do a search with only a date, like on:today or on:week or on:month and then sort by recent. The output is a little bit verbose but it's basically a reverse chronological view of every message across every channel.

In the browser you can bookmark this search, which would help with doing more complex stuff like viewing all messages from only a subset of channels: on:week in:#general in:#random in:#other

Answer 3

It doesn't appear so. The best I think you can do is a combination of two moves.

First, set your preferences so that only channels with unread messages show. Preferences>Advanced Options>Hide any channels or DMs which have no unread activity

You should now only see channels that have unread activity.

Secondly, you can move between channels with unread messages with alt shift down

Not perfect but better than the default setup.