Facebook and Messenger chat history: find, delete or download messages

Most online activities are stored for posterity somewhere, and surely Facebook is no exception. Not only can all written posts and comments be found and recovered, but chat conversations can also be reread and, if necessary, also downloaded. Even though Facebook doesn’t have a section on its site or app that lists the official chat history, there are still easy ways to find all sent and received messages that Facebook keeps automatically unless they have been manually deleted. You can read Facebook chats both through the Messenger app and through the Facebook site itself. You can also find all archived Facebook messages, even if they are hidden in another menu, and also the history of messages from people who are not in our friends list.
So let’s see how find all messages in Facebook and Messenger chat history, come delete individual chats and also how to save all conversations on PC.

Index Article

See your Facebook Chat history from your PC

There are two ways to see all Facebook chat conversations even the oldest ones:
1) On the Facebook site opened from a PC, by clicking on the message button at the top right. Select the conversation to open it and then scroll up and down to see all sent and received messages. At the bottom of the list of conversations you can then click on the link “see all on Messenger“which opens the web page www.facebook.com/messages, with the complete list of all conversations with friends and others.
On the left side you can press the gear button to be able to open different sections of messages including: Archived conversations, those that have been archived to remove them from the main list, Unread conversations to find all the messages you have never looked at and then also Message requests, which is a list of all users who have written to us without being our friends. These messages are always a surprise to watch, because Facebook never gives notification of these requests, so we often forget about their existence. In the list of various Facebook Messenger chats you can find old messages sent and received using the search bar top left.
2) on PC it is also possible to access the history of the Facebook chat also by going to the Messenger.com site, which is identical to the Facebook messages page.

See Facebook Chat History from Tablet or Smartphone using the Messenger app

As we have known for years now, the main Facebook app no ​​longer allows you to chat with friends. To send private messages in chat you need to install the Messenger app on iPhone and Android. From the application you can scroll down going back in time until you find the chat you were looking for.
To do this first you can use the search bar at the top of the Messenger main page (the one that lists all your conversations) you can search your entire history to find any message.
If you use the app Messenger Lite, you can scroll through the conversations in chronological order, going up to the last one, but you cannot use the search bar.

How to Download All Facebook Chat History to PC

If you want to download an actual copy of the Facebook history logs, you need to use a computer and open the Facebook.com site. From here you can press on the small arrow at the top right of the main menu to open the settings from the drop-down menu. On the left side, click on Your information on Facebook and then, in the central part of the page, click on Download your information.
In the list of all data that can be downloaded, uncheck everything except Messages, which is the entire Messenger chat history. After confirming, wait for the e-mail with the link to download all the messages on the PC in the form of a ZIP file to be extracted in a folder.

Delete messenger history messages and Facebook chats

To delete entire chats in Messenger from smartphones, you can swipe each conversation to the left to bring up the del key trash can which cancels it definitively. Pressing the instead key with three lines you can choose to hide it using the function that archives the conversation. You can then prevent a person from texting us other messages by opening the conversation and then tapping the i button. From the menu that appears, press on Block.
On a PC you can delete conversations or archive them by moving the mouse over the name of the person with whom you have exchanged messages and then pressing the gear wheel that appears next to it. From this menu you can archive or delete the chat, block the person to stop receiving messages or disable notifications.

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