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Flow keeps what your agent and its contacts say only as long as it needs to. Two things remove it: your plan’s retention period, which applies to everyone, and deleting a contact, which erases one person at once.

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Retention

Message content and files are kept for your plan’s retention period, 30 days by default. After it:
  • a message’s content is removed and the message is no longer returned by GET /v1/conversations/{conversation_id}/messages;
  • files are deleted, and their file_id is not found;
  • events older than it leave the log (GET /v1/events, the stream).
Contacts and conversations themselves stay until you delete them, so a person who writes again after a month is still the same contact.

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Delete a contact

Call DELETE /v1/contacts/{contact_id} when the person asks you to delete their data, or when you delete them in your own product. It answers 204 No Content, and so does every repeat, so it is safe to retry. An ID your app never had in this mode answers 404 not_found with param contact_id, like GET /v1/contacts/{contact_id}.
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It works within the key’s app and mode, and it cannot be undone.

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What is erased

  • The contact’s name and address: phone, username, Telegram user ID, iMessage handle, and on SMS their recorded consent and opt-out.
  • The content of every message in their conversations, inbound and outbound, with reply quotes, metadata and what the channel reported back.
  • The files sent or received in those conversations, including uploads you sent them. A file_id you sent to a deleted contact is not found afterwards: upload the file again to send it to someone else.
  • The events of those conversations. They are no longer returned by GET /v1/events, the stream or webhooks. An event ID you already hold still works as an after or before cursor, so paging never breaks.
  • Webhook deliveries of those events that were still pending: they are not sent.
  • Messages still queued to the contact: they are not sent. A message already handed to the channel may still arrive.
  • Saved Idempotency-Key answers that held their data. Repeating such a request answers 404 not_found.

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What is kept

Only IDs, timestamps, and the counts that bill and pace your senders (allowances, new-contact budgets, warm-up). The contact and their conversations answer 404 not_found from then on and are not listed. Flow cannot delete what the channel itself keeps, such as the chat on the person’s own device.

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After the delete

  • Your endpoints receive contact.deleted, once, with only the contact’s ID in data.contact. Delete what you keep about them too.
  • If the person writes again, or you send to their address, they are a new contact with a new ID and a new conversation (conversation.started). The channel’s usual rules apply to it, such as the WhatsApp 24-hour window.
  • On a shared sandbox sender the person leaves your app; they send your join code again to talk to it.
  • On SMS the opt-out is erased with the contact. Carriers keep blocking a number that texted STOP, so do not text it again unless the person opts in again.
contact.deleted