"If you choose to keep old text messages or photos, print them out, keep a hard copy, and put them away in a box," suggests Dr. Klapow. "Then, delete them. If you are in a new relationship, there's nothing more disrespectful than having old love letters right at your fingertips."
Deleting messages is essential for buying or reselling used iPhones or Androids to give buyers a clean slate when starting with their new phone. Removing texts can also free up storage space on devices. Depending on what kind of phone you have, be sure to follow the specific procedure to delete messages permanently.
Select 30 days, save the settings, and never look back. (In Android, you can go to your Messaging app, Settings, and go to the Delete Old Messages feature.
You'll be surprised to see how much storage space your text messages take on your smartphone. You may not even realize those messages are being saved to your phone. Don't worry, you can delete them. Be sure to delete messages with photos and videos first — they chew up the most space.
Psychologists say the way you clean (or don't clean) your inbox actually does say something about your personality. Those who delete quickly and efficiently might be control freaks, while those with 1,000 unread emails may not be as unorganized as you'd think.
Disappearing messages is an optional feature you can turn on for more privacy. When you enable disappearing messages, you can set messages to disappear 24 hours, 7 days, or 90 days after the time they are sent, unless that message is kept.
Improves the speed of your phone
With the passage of time, these tiny messages start taking up space in your smartphone's memory, which results in slow processing. By deleting your text messages regularly, you can free up space and practically make your phone work faster.
What's likely stealing all the storage space are all the attachments you send and receive — audio, photos, stickers, videos, GIFs, and files.
Popularized by the romcom, the three-day dating rule insists that a person wait three full days before contacting a potential suitor. A first-day text or call is too eager, a second-day contact seems planned, but three days is, somehow, the perfect amount of time.
How far back can police retrieve text messages? This answer depends on the phone, its memory, whether the message was deleted, and the phone owner's service provider. If the messages are still on the phone, the police may be able to access them no matter how long ago they were sent.
Your provider or "carrier" keeps records of your cellphone use, including calls and text messages, and even pictures sent from your phone. Almost all cellphone carriers give detailed information about a phone's use in billing statements sent to the owner.
Deleting messages changes only your own Messages conversations, not those of your recipients. Tip: Use Undo Send to retract a message you sent accidentally.
Some phone companies also keep records of sent text messages. They sit on the company's server for anywhere from three days to three months, depending on the company's policy. Verizon holds texts for up to five days and Virgin Mobile keeps them for 90 days.
We can often take various words and formats negatively, causing tension in the conversation. No matter what you do, a conversation via text will never be as clear-cut as a face-to-face conversation or one done via a phone call.
Disabling and deleting Messages in iCloud will remove all your conversations from your iCloud account. As a result, your text conversations will no longer sync across your devices.
Emails can take up tons of space on your Android operating system. If you keep thousands — or even hundreds — of emails around, then it's time that you clear a significant amount of space by deleting these emails in Gmail.
Also make sure you check other folders where emails are stored. Tap the Menu (three lines) icon at the top left. Check the Sent folder or any other folder you think may contain emails you can delete. Regular emails do not take up a lot of space.
Sometimes the "Android storage space running out but it's not" issue is caused by the overwhelming amount of data stored on your phone's internal memory. If you have many apps on your Android device and use them simultaneously, cache memory on your phone can be blocked, which leads to Android insufficient storage.
The apps for cloud storage services such as Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, etc., save your files in the cloud. So clearing data for them on your Android phone will not delete the files associated with these services. You will be logged out from the app after clearing the data.
"If you are keeping them for sentimental purposes and you are not in a relationship with anyone else, then it is your choice," confirms Klapow. "However, if you move on to another relationship, keeping this part of your past in your present, on your phone, is 100 percent not appropriate."
According to Google Support, you can restore texts, calls, device settings, contacts, calendars, photos and videos by opening the Google Drive app, tapping “Menu” then “Backups” and then restoring the backup version you're looking for.
Yes, it's definitely possible for someone to spy on your text messages and it's certainly something you should be aware of – this is a potential way for a hacker to gain a lot of private information about you – including accessing PIN codes sent by websites used to verify your identity (such as online banking).