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I think what he meant was, Once you successfully put a message to SQS, it is kept till the 'message retention period' unless you explicitly call delete on it. Right now you can configure the period to be upto 14 days. AFAIK, there is no way to recover messages older than their retention period.


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> Those messages will age out and vanish after a little while (14 days is currently the max); but before they go, they’re stored carefully and are very unlikely to go missing

can somebody expand on this? I know about the 14 days limitation but this makes it sound like you can store messages for a long time and still recover them somehow?


> Keep Messages you can set the retention period for messages to 30 days and they'll automatically get cleaned up.

You underestimate the number of large files kids and grandparents can send in a chat in 30 days.


Once a message is deleted there is no way to recover it, to my knowledge. But message retention in Slack is infinite. Further, sessions are infinite, at least last I set it up.

I think we set something like 1 year of retention for "public" channels, 9 months for private, and then certain channels can lower it beyond that. Same for files. And we have our tokens expire once a month.

The defaults for Slack are pretty insane.


Then they should just auto-delete messages older than the retention period.

They're referring to retention on the server, not the phone I believe. The phone could store the message indefinitely even if the server didn't. The server just needs to hold it long enough for your device (devices?) to download it.

Is this still the case even if you set it messages to self-delete after a set period?

> There is no need to keep all old messages beyond one week.

Based on what use case? Many times I searched old personal and group chats, to find what I wanted in a message from 1 year before


The company I work for very specifically turned on message auto deletion after 90 days after a discussion with Compliance. Want to store something for a long time? Use the official wiki.

Well they don't need to store your whole message, once they have processed it and updated their profile database with whatever is of value to them they will most likely delete it. They should all happen within minutes if not seconds of you sending the message.

Every enterprise-friendly messaging system offers configurable retention policies. Messages involving certain roles or keywords may need to be retained for years to comply with regulations, while others can be deleted after a few days to minimize risk.

This is one reason we decided at Cotap to purge messages after 14 days by default, and only keep them longer if requested (https://cotap.com/blog/customizable-data-retention-for-busin...). Contrary to what one might expect, most users embraced the change.

Your Messages. We do not retain your messages in the ordinary course of providing our Services to you. Once your messages (including your chats, photos, videos, voice messages, files, and share location information) are delivered, they are deleted from our servers. Your messages are stored on your own device. If a message cannot be delivered immediately (for example, if you are offline), we may keep it on our servers for up to 30 days as we try to deliver it. If a message is still undelivered after 30 days, we delete it. To improve performance and deliver media messages more efficiently, such as when many people are sharing a popular photo or video, we may retain that content on our servers for a longer period of time. We also offer end-to-end encryption for our Services, which is on by default, when you and the people with whom you message use a version of our app released after April 2, 2016. End-to-end encryption means that your messages are encrypted to protect against us and third parties from reading them.

^ c/pasted to remove horizontal scrollbar


> What sensible people do is have a retention policy of not keeping chats longer than, say seven days.

Maybe that's good from a company perspective, but from an employee perspective not being able to search old conversations is abysmal.


That’s not the case. After a certain number of messages in a chat, old ones disappear.

There is a recommendation though: use message expiry.

I experienced data loss on Messages lately. But, I understand it might take some significant time since I set it to never delete forever.

Actualy I think that messages are only kept until all registrered devices (at reception time) get them. For instance if you register a new device to iCloud you never get previous messages (otherwise San Bernadino case is moot cause they could have access this history).

I think there is also an expiration time limit running from the moment the first device receive a message for the others devices to get the same message, but we are in undocumented territory about that AFAIK...


I set signal to auto delete messages older than 2 weeks. There is zero reason to keep messages of a personal relation longer than that, for me at least. I am prone to nostalgic romanticizing, and not having access to past messages kind of solves that problem.

I'm not sure if that explains why deleted messages from months ago are being resurrected. That would imply that there is a persistence framework that has multi-month readback capability.
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