Archive Facebook Messenger Chats
By Tracey Dowdy
How many unread emails do you have? Text messages? Messenger chats? If you’re like me, that number is minimal – I cannot abide notifications. That little icon telling me I have unread messages gives me low-key anxiety. I turn off the alerts on my phone and at least once, but usually at least twice a day, I hit “Select All” and delete everything under the Social and Promotions tabs in Gmail. Anything in Primary gets read and responded to or noted as important to address later. I’m a little obsessive.
I was thrilled to learn that Facebook allows users to get rid of message bloat through an archiving feature that removes messages from your Chat inbox while saving them to access later. The feature has been around for a while, but I’d never taken advantage of it.
We all leaned more heavily on social media for connection during the pandemic, so you may notice that your Messenger Inbox has chats from people you don’t want to lose touch with but also don’t need to be at the top of your chat list when you open the app.
To archive those old messages but still be able to access them later:
1. Open the Messenger app.
2. In the main Chats inbox, find a message you want to archive. Swipe left on the message.
3. Tap the purple tab that says Archive. (If you tap the More tab, you’ll see options to mark as unread, mute, ignore, delete or block.)
If you want to go back and find your archived messages, here’s what to do:
1. Open the Messenger app.
2. Tap your profile picture in the top left corner.
3. Tap Archived Chats.
All your archived chats will be visible. Swipe right on each chat you want to bring into your main Messenger pane hit unarchive, or tap More to mark as unread, ignore, delete or block.
Messenger has added a few new features this week, including new Star Wars and Selena: The Series chat themes, stickers that celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, and read receipts (just like in text messaging) to messages in the inbox view, so you can now see if your message was received.
