Auto-delete old message content (opt-in communications retention)

What it is

What it does

Omniscio can hold a lot of communications content on your behalf — text messages it has sent or received (SMS, Telegram, Slack, incoming webhooks), email samples it learned your writing style from, voiceprint data, meeting recordings and transcripts, and the daily digests it builds from all of the above. By default that content is kept indefinitely.

Communications retention is an opt-in setting that automatically, permanently deletes that content once it is older than a window you choose. It is a privacy control: turn it on, pick a number of days, and from then on Omniscio erases old message content so it does not pile up forever.

It is off by default — nothing is ever deleted until you deliberately turn it on. When you do, there is no "undo": the deletion is permanent, including every derived copy (for example the daily digest built from a message). Because it is permanent, two safety steps stand between turning it on and the first deletion — see The safety net below.

Where to find it

Settings → System → "Auto-Delete Old Message Content."

• A toggle turns the feature on or off. It is off by default.
• Turning it on shows a confirmation dialog (the deletion is permanent) and then reveals a "Delete message content older than (days)" box.
• The window must be between 30 and 3650 days (1 month to 10 years). Turning the feature on seeds a sensible one-year (365-day) default you can then change.

You can also read or set the window over Omniscio's CLI control server, because it is a normal setting (communicationsRetentionDays, where 0 means off) — the same GET/PATCH /settings route every setting uses.

How it behaves

What gets deleted — and what never does

When the window is on and past the grace period, Omniscio permanently deletes, on its normal daily housekeeping pass, anything older than your window in:

• SMS, Telegram, Slack, and incoming-webhook messages (and an SMS conversation once its last message is gone).
• Email-summarizer samples — the sampled emails Omniscio kept to learn your style.
• Voiceprint data — the voice corpus and comparison records.
• Daily digests — the derived summaries built from the above.
• Meeting recordings and raw transcripts — the audio file on disk and the raw transcript text.

It never touches:

• Your agent sessions and their chat history.
• Your saved vault / KMS notes and saved contacts.
• Your meeting notes — the summary, enhanced notes, and action items Omniscio wrote from a meeting are kept even though the raw recording and transcript are deleted. You keep the useful record; only the bulky raw source goes.
• Anything in your projects, tasks, or team data.

The rule is: raw communications content is cleaned up; your curated work is kept.

The safety net

Because there is no undo, turning the feature on does not immediately delete anything. Two things happen first:

1. A one-time notice. The moment you turn it on, Omniscio raises a single inbox notice — "Communications auto-deletion is on" — that spells out exactly what will be deleted and what is kept, with a one-click button back to the setting. It appears once, so you always know the feature is armed before it does anything.
2. A 30-day grace period. The first deletion does not run until 30 days after you turned the feature on. If you change your mind within the first month and turn it back off, nothing was ever deleted. Turning it off clears the countdown; turning it on again later starts a fresh 30-day grace and shows the notice again.

Together the opt-in choice, the one-time notice, and the 30-day grace are the safety on a permanent, no-undo action.

Turning it off

Settings → System → "Auto-Delete Old Message Content" and turn the toggle off. That stops all future deletions immediately and clears the grace countdown. Content that was already deleted while it was on cannot be recovered, but nothing further is deleted once it is off.

How it relates to other retention in Omniscio

Omniscio has a few independent cleanup mechanisms; this is the opt-in one for communications:

• Session retention (always on) bounds the bulky diagnostic rows inside agent sessions — it is about database size, not privacy, and it never deletes your actual conversation. See Conversation-message retention.
• Meeting transcript retention is a separate, narrower meetings-only setting. Communications retention can also clean up meeting raw transcripts/audio on your chosen window, independently of that setting, and always keeps the derived meeting notes.
• Scratchpad auto-delete is the sibling opt-in control for scratchpad notes, in the same Settings → System area.

For agents

Where it lives in code

• src/main/db/queries-communications-retention.ts — the purge core: resolveCommsRetentionCutoff (the OFF / grace / cutoff decision) and purgeCommunicationsRetention (the age-delete over the covered tables, the SMS FK-parent sweep, and the meetings raw-transcript reuse).
• src/main/app/startup/data-retention.ts — wires the sweep into the daily retention tick and fs-removes the returned meeting audio files (non-fatal).
• src/main/services/settings-apply.ts — the communications-retention-notice side-effect that stamps the grace anchor and raises the one-time notice on the OFF→ON edge.
• src/renderer/src/features/settings/sections/general/GeneralSettings.tsx — the toggle, the confirm-on-enable dialog, and the days input.

The full engineering contract (test-locked invariants + safe-change checklist) is .claude/memory/contracts/communications-retention-contract.md.

Related

Communications retention is one of several independent cleanups; the always-on sweep it sits beside is described in the conversation-message-retention contract below, and its closest opt-in sibling — auto-deleting old scratchpad notes, in the same Settings area — is on the scratchpads page.

• conversation-message-retention (session DB trim) — the always-on session sweep this sits beside.
• scratchpads.md — the sibling opt-in "auto-delete old scratchpad notes" control.