How the Flashback bot works and what access it needs
Flashback is an ordinary bot that you connect yourself to the private chats you choose, through Telegram’s Chat Automation. It receives notifications about deleted and edited messages in those chats and keeps a copy in an encrypted archive. It cannot see or recover anything deleted before you connected it.
Open in TelegramTelegram opens. No Premium needed, and the bot will see only the private chats you choose.
What access it needs
“Read Messages”, to notice deletions and edits, and “Reply to Messages”, to notice that the other person deleted the whole chat: Telegram does not report this, so the bot checks it itself and sends nothing to the other person. The bot needs nothing else.
What the bot does not do
It does not log in to your account, does not ask for an SMS code or password, does not use AI to read your conversations, and does not see chats you did not choose.
What Telegram actually sends
To a connected bot Telegram sends three kinds of events: a new message, a new version of a message, and “messages deleted”. The last one carries only the ids of the deleted messages, not their content. That is why Flashback saves every message the moment it arrives: when a deletion notice comes, the text is already with the bot. Everything sent before you connected is not passed to the bot by Telegram and cannot be brought back.
What Telegram does not pass to the bot
Calls, expired media, service messages about payments, gifts and Premium, and some other service messages are not passed to bots by Telegram, so they will not be in the archive. Disappearing photos, videos, voice messages and video notes are saved only if you reply to the message before you open it; the other person will see your reply, but you can delete it. Groups, channels and secret chats are not supported.
Photos, voice messages and files
The bot downloads and stores photos, videos, voice messages, video messages, files, stickers and GIFs. The limit for a file is 20 MB: Telegram does not let bots download larger ones. If a file is bigger, the archive shows a note that it was not saved, while the text and caption remain.
Which chats the bot sees
You choose which private chats to connect and can exclude any of them while keeping the rest. The bot receives nothing more from an excluded chat. Only one such bot can be connected to an account: if you connect another, the previous one is disconnected.
How to disconnect
Disconnect the bot in Telegram’s settings at any time. 48 hours after disconnecting, the archive is erased completely; you can delete it sooner with the /delete_my_data command.
More questions
- Do I need Telegram Premium?
- No. Chat Automation works without Premium.
- Does the bot see groups and channels?
- No, only the private chats you chose.
- Does the bot work when my phone is off?
- Yes. Flashback runs on a server, not on your phone, and receives updates from Telegram. The Mini App with the archive opens inside Telegram.
- Will the other person know a bot is connected to the chat?
- No. Telegram does not show the other person that a bot is connected to your chat, and Flashback does not write to them. The other person has rights of their own: with the /forget_me command they can erase their chats from the archives of every Flashback user.
- Why can’t the bot show what was deleted before I connected it?
- Because Telegram sends the bot only new events, and for a deletion it passes just the message numbers, with no text. The bot has a copy only if the message arrived while it was connected.
Related questions
Past deletions are gone. The next ones you can see
Connect Flashback before something important gets erased. The bot walks you through connecting step by step, and you can disconnect it at any time.
Open in Telegram