Message retention and exports in Relay

Choose how long Relay keeps messages, set a different rule for a channel, and export conversations to a ZIP in your Drive.

Decide how long your team's Relay messages are kept, and save a copy of any conversation — with its files — to your Drive whenever you need one.

Before you start: you need permission to manage Relay. Ask your workspace owner for permission to manage Relay if you don't see Retention & export in the left column.

Relay Retention & export with messages kept for 90 days and a list of finished exports with Open in Drive buttons

Choose how long messages are kept

  1. Open Relay and click Retention & export in the left column.
  2. Under Message retention, pick Forever or For a number of days in Keep messages.
  3. If you chose days, type a number between 1 and 3650 in Days.
  4. Click Save.

The setting applies to every channel and direct message in the workspace. Messages past the limit are deleted within the hour.

Give one channel its own rule

A channel can keep messages longer or shorter than the workspace — for example, keep #announcements forever while everything else is kept for 90 days.

  1. Open the channel and click its name to open the details panel.
  2. Go to the Settings tab and find Message history.
  3. In Keep messages, pick Forever, For a number of days, or Workspace setting to follow the workspace again.
  4. Click Save.

Export conversations

  1. In Relay, click Retention & export.
  2. Under Export conversations, pick one conversation in Conversation, or leave All conversations.
  3. Optionally set From and To dates. Leave both empty to export everything.
  4. Click Start export.

You get a notification when the export is ready. Click it, or Open in Drive next to the export, to find the ZIP in My Drive › Exports.

Each conversation in the ZIP has a page you can open in any browser (messages.html), a data file for other tools (messages.json) and a files folder with its attachments.

Good to know

  • Deleted messages can't be recovered. Export first if you need a copy before shortening the limit.
  • Relay deletes a whole thread at a time: a thread goes once its first message and its latest reply are both older than the limit. A thread people are still replying to is kept in full.
  • Direct messages always follow the workspace setting.
  • A channel shared with another organization follows the rules of the organization that created it.
  • An export includes public channels, channels you are in and your own direct messages. It never includes other people's direct messages or private channels you aren't in.
  • Attachments are included up to 1 GB per export. Files past that are listed in export.json and left out — export a shorter date range to get them.
  • The export is saved in your own Drive and counts toward your workspace's storage.
  • You can run two exports at a time. Your recent exports are listed for 30 days.
  • Retention changes and exports are recorded in the audit log.