How to permanently delete old messages from Messages in iCloud?
[Yes, I know this is not a new problem. But maybe someone has found a fix I haven’t seen yet.]
About once a year, I’ll export all my Apple Messages using iMazing’s excellent export feature from my Mac to an external database, then delete all my conversations on my Mac. I am using Messages in iCloud on all my devices (two Macs, an iPhone, and an iPad), and they will disappear within seconds from them, and I can start from scratch. So far, so good.
Unfortunately, after a day or two, deleted conversations and messages will reappear – only some, and only on one or two devices. This is frustrating, so I’d like to “Empty the trash” – something that is available for most Apple apps and cloud services, but not in Messages.
macOS System Settings / “Apple Account” / “iCloud Messages” still shows 24,000 messages when it should be about a dozen.
What I tried:
- Change “Keep Messages” from “Forever” to “30 days” (that was two days ago).
- Go to Messages / “Recently deleted”, delete all recently deleted conversations and delete them from there, on every device.
- Run “Sync now” on all devices.
And still, the message count in System settings is at 23,000-ish messages (it seems to drop a bit each day).
Shouldn’t this go down to one month’s worth of messages (here: 2,000) immediately when I change the “Keep Messages” setting?
And is there any other way to purge those messages?
Thank you.
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
Original Title: “Purging” Messages from Cloud?
