You may want to be able to delete a message you received on your side of
the communications though. It would be a useful feature.
Also on the electrum client you are allowed to "delete" the messages you
sent by right clicking on the message and then clicking delete.
It doesn't look like the user can delete messages they have received
from others though.
On 1/15/23 19:39, bill-auger wrote:
How to delete a message?
once a message is sent and received, it is impossible to delete
- it "happened"; and past events can not be altered - when the
message is delivered (usually immediately) the receiver has
received it, and probably has read it within seconds - so
deleting chat messages is pointless, in all normal circumstances
that is not specific to jami - it is fundamentally true for all
libre communications software - some may have such a feature,
which appears to delete messages; but is never sincere - it is
always an illusion, which can be exposed by the receiver (or a
"MITM" observer, if the message is not encrypted properly)
only non-free software could have a reliable deletion feature -
it still would be an illusion; but because it is non-free, it
would be very difficult for a user to remove that illusion
the important thing to remember, is that a deletion feature is
not very useful anyways; because, the message has usually been
read by the receiver, within seconds of receiving it - so, not
only is there no point in deleting messages, there is no point in
keeping them either - the time window of relevance for any chat
message is very narrow - in all normal use-cases, chat needs no
storage - all messages may live only "on-the-wire", perhaps
cached, but only for re-tries of failed deliveries
if the message was important or has a longer time window of
relevance, then synchronous communication such as chat, is not
the right tool for the job - asynchronous communication with
permanent storage (such as email or web forum), are much more
appropriate
