Guide
How to read a Slack export
A Slack workspace export is a ZIP of JSON. users.json lists people. channels.json lists conversations. Each channel is a folder of day files such as general/2024-01-02.json, and each day file is an array of messages.
Slack does not put a readable transcript in that ZIP. Names are ids like U123 until you join them to users.json. Threads point at a parent timestamp. Files are links, not the files themselves.
That shape is why an export is awkward to hand to a lawyer, an auditor, or a new admin. HTML is easier to read. CSV is easier to search in a spreadsheet. A Mattermost JSONL file is one way to import the text into another chat tool.
GearOps reads the ZIP on the server, shows a short preview, and deletes the file after 24 hours. The preview is not the download.