Message retention policy
This feature is only available to organization owners.
By default, Zulip stores messages indefinitely, allowing full-text
search of your complete history.
Zulip supports configuring both a global organization-level message
retention policy, as well as retention policies for individual
streams. These policies control how many days a message is stored
before being automatically deleted (the default being forever).
Zulip's system supports:
- Setting an organization-level retention policy, which applies to
all private messages and all streams without a specific policy.
- Setting a retention policy for individual streams, which overrides
the organization-level policy for that stream. This can be used to
just delete messages on specific streams, to only retain messages
forever on specific streams, or just to have a different retention
period.
In Zulip Cloud, message retention policies are available on the Zulip
Cloud Standard and Zulip Cloud Plus plans,
as well as for the hundreds of communities with sponsored Cloud
Standard hosting.
- Instructions for all platforms
-
Go to Organization settings.
-
Under Message retention, configure Message retention period.
-
Click Save changes.
- Instructions for all platforms
-
Go to All streams.
-
Select a stream.
-
Select the General tab on the right.
-
Click the pencil ()
to the right of Stream permissions.
-
Under Message retention for stream, configure
Message retention period.
-
Click Save changes.
Note: This sends an automated notification to the stream
events topic in the modified stream.
Important details
-
Retention policies are processed in a daily job; so changes in the
policy won't have any effect until the next time the daily job runs.
-
Deleted messages are preserved temporarily in a special archive. So
if you discover a misconfiguration accidentally deleted content you
meant to preserve, contact Zulip support promptly for assistance with
restoration. See the deletion
documentation for
more details on precisely how message deletion works in Zulip.
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