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Delete, archive & forward

AChat gives you three ways to manage what is in a chat: soft-delete a message to a per-chat Trash you can restore from, privately archive a whole chat to your account, and forward a message into another chat.

Trash (soft-delete with a 30-day window)​

Delete a message and it goes to that chat's Trash rather than vanishing:

  • Restore it, delete it permanently, or Clear all trashed messages.
  • Trash retention is capped by the chat's own lifetime — a Trash entry never outlives the chat, and deleting only ever pulls its expiry earlier, never later.
  • Delete an individual thread reply on its own. Delete the thread's parent and every reply in that thread moves to Trash with it, including older replies outside the chat's live message window.
  • Deletion is best-effort and owner-oriented, consistent with how AChat's other edits work: the rules constrain the shape of the change, not who may make it.

You can also delete a whole chat from your view.

Private archive (login-gated)​

Signing in with Google unlocks a private archive that locks a chat to your account:

  • Once archived, only you, while signed in, can read that chat — a read-only snapshot.
  • A password alone will not unlock an archived chat. The account gate is enforced by the security rules, separately from any chat password. Archiving implies keeping the chat past the 10-day auto-delete.

This is different from the local declutter archive (a personal "tidy this away" that only affects your own list) and from reserving a chat (which extends a chat's lifetime for everyone in it).

Forward​

Forward a message to reuse it elsewhere:

  • Text can be forwarded anywhere you can write.
  • Files can be forwarded into any open chat.

You can also copy a direct link to a message, and mark messages read or unread.

Honest framing​

  • Soft-delete and restore act on the copy stored in the chat; a message someone already read or copied is not recalled.
  • The private archive gates who can read the chat (your signed-in account); it is a separate protection from the client-side password encryption, not a replacement for it.