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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.
  • 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.