How To Delete Telegram Messages and Chat Histories
Understanding How Telegram Stores Your Chats
There are two major types of chats on Telegram and they are:
Secret chats and
Cloud chats.
Cloud chats stays between you and other Telegram users (which can include public groups you belong to or channels) and they are not end-to-end encrypted.
Secret chats are never uploaded to any server and they are end-to-end encrypted between the sender and the receiver.
Telegram says that cloud chats are “heavily encrypted and the encryption keys used in each case are stored in several other data centers in seperate areas” in a bid to protect your privacy. Without the end-to-end encryption (where only the sender and the recipient can decrypt the messages), your chats can potentially be intercepted, even if they are encrypted on a server or in an application.
In addition to this, cloud chats are chats that are stored in the cloud. This makes it very easy for you to use Telegram on seperate devices, since you can easily download your conversations and message history.
Deleting Messages from Telegram
As of Telegram 5.5, anyone can delete a message from a one-on-one chat from all your devices. This includes both messages that you have sent and messages that you have received. There are no time limits, and the message would be deleted from all devices, including the the Telegram server.
Cloud chats with several participants works different. You can only delete messages that you have sent from everyone’s devices within 48 hours of you sending them. After this, you can still delete any message, but it would remain on both the server and on the recipients’ devices. If the recipients also delete the message on their wnd, then it is gone forever.
To delete a message, tap and hold on it, then choose Delete.
You can then choose from “Delete for me” and “Delete for everyone,” or whoever it is you are talking to.
One slightly confusing part that is worth noting is this: If you or a recipient is somehow using a version of Telegram that is older than 5.5 in a one-on-one chat, then you are limited to the same 48-hour window and the rules that currently exist for the cloud chats.
If you want to erase all copies of such a message from the Telegram’s servers even the copy with the recipient, you will need to ask the recipient of the message to delete it on their device also.
To delete the whole conversation, swipe right on it in the conversations list and click on Delete. You will be asked whether you want to delete messages on your end or for the whole conversation.
How to Delete Everything That You Have Ever Sent
Do you want to delete everything that you have ever sent? For a nuclear option, you can delete your whole Telegram account. But if you have sent sensitive messages that are containing private data to anyone, you may need to ask them to delete their own copies of those messages from their account to make sure that all copies are completely removed from Telegram’s servers.
