Hey Apple: How do you permanently delete iMessages (saved) ?!

Because of your preamble I am a little nervous about taking a stab at this one. But I would imagine that the memory that the deleted messages are taking up are actually stored in the cache memory of the phone. For example, if you delete all your messages and then do a spotlight search for text found in one of the messages you just deleted the spotlight search will pull up that message (even though you deleted it). As far as I know there is no way to delete the cache memory on the iPhone.

There is evidently a ton of data that is stored in the cache memory of the phone.

Hope this helps. 😉

Whew! Glad I could help Striker.

Striker wrote:

First, THANK YOU for taking the time to reply. The preamble was only meant to tell people who will insultingly give "beginner" answers that those of us that are having this issue are very smart folks and this is an "advanced" issue, not just a generic: "to delete a message, swipe it" inquiry.

That being said, I definitely agree with you that the messages are being cached/archived (without my permission, I might add) yet when the Messages app is empty there should be NO message data at all in the phone!

Out of frustration, I did a FULL factory restore just to see... yup, it is down to only 152 Kb(!) but when I restore from backup, it says "Messages (saved) 1.0 GB" !!

Yet the Messages app is still empty!

So, the fact that the iOS knows that there is data here, and heck, even adds the word "(Saved)" spelled exactly like that, means Apple KNOWS this situation may happen. So, Apple needs to please find a solution... all that needs to be done is add a User option to DELETE All Data. If it can SEE it, it should be able to DELETE it.

This is yet another reason why I sometimes hate "Finders" that do not allow you access to the data files themselves.

Firstly you DO NOT have to do a factory reset / wipe device, it is simply not required to get the space back!!

Mine had 3GB and I just got rid of it all, here is how:

METHOD ONE:

1. Make a backup in iTunes
2. open iBackupBot (Google it)
3. Go to the relevant backup
4. Click on Multimedia File Manager and click on the other Multimedia files tab
5. Sort by filename by clicking the Filename tab
6. Find MediaDomain/Library/SMS/Attachments and highlight all of them, then press delete. You can also click to export to a folder of your choice, if you want to save them that is.
7. Then go to System Files>MediaDomain>Library>SMS>Attachments
8. They will be all listed here, highlight them all and press delete
9. Then just restore that backup using iTunes!

Tadaa! Space recovered, your messages are still there but without the attachments! METHOD TWO:

1. Backup your device in iTunes and then to iCloud
2. Go to Settings>iCloud and toggle Documents & Data to OFF
3. Then do a 2nd backup to iTunes and iCloud
4. Then restore the device from iCloud and the message attachments should be gone, turn Documents & Data back on again in the settings

PLEASE NOTE: Method two is a much longer process but some users may feel more comfortable with this method.

P.S You may want to make two backups in case you get any of the above steps wrong, but it is simple to follow the above and not do anything wrong!

P.P.S You could also just go through every single conversation and delete the attachments one by one, but if you have hundreds or thousands of attachments, this will take a VERY LONG TIME!!!

I have tried this and everything seems to go as you describe, until I try to back up at the last step. I am getting an error message that my iPhone doesn't have enough space for the backup...how is that possible when I have deleted 6 GB of attachments? How can I not have enough room on my phone?

Is it possible that this is a "feature" added by Apple at the request of the NSA? Given the Snowden leaks, this would seem right in line. Imagine the average user thinks they really are deleting their messages when in fact they are just hiding them. At any international border crossing this could get really interesting.

As for iBackupBot...that's great that it can delete things from your backup image. Now how do you know it is also not adding things in, like trojans and keystroke loggers?

Why is it I just do NOT trust these iBotBackupYoShizznick type programs that keep getting thrown around that supposedly solve EVERY iOS issue?

Seriously, Apple, give us a **** solution to your problem. It shouldn't be this hard to deleted some data!!!

HI, I have tried Method 1 and 2 and neither worked. What do i do?

APPLE....FIX THE PROBLEM!!!!....I CAN'T GET RID OF MINE EITHER & I CHATTED WITH AN APPLE REP ONLINE & RESTORING DOESN'T WORK1111

<Edited by Host>

The same happens with my emails I totally delete them empty my trash and they are still there taking up valuable memory. Apple please fix I only have a few emails in my email box but taking up 830 mg of memory so not right

I see most apps have something that denotes the actual size of the app and then additional things like documents and data usage size.

I have no messages, but my usage says 18.8MB (as I deleted them all). Is it possible that's just the size of the app? Mabye iMessages combines app size and message sizes...

Either way, I'm wondering if either iTunes 11.1.5 or iOS 7.1 will address this

I read with interest the problem you described and then took a look at my Usage amounts in the Settings app.

My Messages usage was 62 MB.

I know i had one message with a video in it. So after backing up that video to my Camera Roll I deleted that thread. I then quit the Messages app. Finally I went back to the Settings > General > Usage area and checked. The amount of usage for Messages dropped to 32 MB.

Have you tried quitting the Messages app after deleting the message threads? Double click the Home button to show the screen with running and recently used apps. Each app icon will have a sample page above it. Flick up on the page (not the app icon) and the page will fly away and the app icon will disappear. This quits that app.

Ralph9430 - doesn't work.

Frustrated beyond belief.