Support to delete also all old private messages

[mitar]

There can be many of them and deleting them manually takes a long time.

I think the MVP could be simply deleting full conversations with anyone you have not talked since year X (so similar to timeline deletion, with --year 2018 it would delete only full conversations which have been last updated in 2018).

A more interesting approach could be to delete only individual messages in all conversations for a given year. Not sure if one can delete also messages from the correspondent. I think that maybe deleting full conversation is then better.

[weskerfoot]

I think the simplest thing would be to just delete the entire conversation, as you say.

If I were going to do this feature I would probably just iterate through all your convos using https://www.facebook.com/messages/t/user.name (not sure about archived ones, probably it would ignore those), and then remove the conversation.

I think I would also want to get archiving working for this, because I think it'd be extremely useful to save conversations (but maybe disable it by default?). I'm not sure what the implications are of that.

As far as I know, unless you used the "private" mode where messages self-destruct, then there's no way to ensure the messages are removed from the recipient's copy.

[mitar]

I understand that it is not possible to really messages available to others, but I would like at least to hide them inside my own thread/conversation. So if somebody looks there nothing is visible on my side.

[weskerfoot]

I agree, I would find it useful as well. In fact I was thinking it could be useful to run it as a cronjob/timer periodically, to cull your conversation list. I'm going to look into ways I can improve the headless experience.

[weskerfoot]

Still a WIP. I ran into a bit of a blocker writing the code that gets the entire list of your conversations. Might be an easier way though.

[weskerfoot]

Found a nice way of doing it on the mobile site. Hopefully I'll have some time tonight to write it up and implement it.

[weskerfoot]

Made some progress. Switched to using the mobile site and now I can easily iterate through all conversations.

Still need to do:

• Archiving
• Filter by year
• Delete

[weskerfoot]

Basic features are implemented (getting a list of all convos, etc) and filtering by year is implemented.

I am going to implement a basic archiving feature and then add an option to delete them. Then this should be good enough to merge in.

[weskerfoot]

This is almost working, I just haven't had time to push it over the finish line

[weskerfoot]

@mitar This is now working in master. I will do a new release soon with updates to the documentation and so on.

#72

[mitar]

Awesome.