Function “Forward chat history” in Redirect Bot is a convenient tool for automatically forwarding old messages from one Telegram chat to another. You can copy not only new posts but also the required fragment of history, taking into account all configured filters and project settings. It is a handy tool for migrating and backing up your content.
Why forward chat history
When you create a new channel or private chat, you often want to bring the best old messages there: breakdowns, guides, media, important discussions. The chat history forwarding feature in Redirect Bot solves exactly this task — it automatically transfers the selected period of old posts from the source Telegram chat to your target channel or group, bypassing Telegram’s standard limitations. For owners of educational projects, thematic communities, and private channels, this is a convenient way to quickly build an archive, move to a new chat, or simply create a backup copy of important content.
How the “Old posts” feature works
In every project in the bot, in the settings menu, there is an item “📜Forward chat history”, which works separately from standard new message forwarding. By default, projects use the “New posts” mode: the bot tracks only fresh publications and immediately forwards them to the designated chat, but when you switch to “Old posts” a separate submenu opens with a choice of the forwarding period, a start button, and a status button.
Important: starting history forwarding is available only once per project, which means you cannot launch this mode again for the same project, so it is worth planning the period and settings in advance.
For the feature to work, you must connect a Telegram account to the project — without it the bot will not get access to the old history and will not be able to bypass typical Telegram client limitations, such as hidden history before you joined or forwarding protection. The connected account allows the bot to “see” and process even those messages that in the regular app look closed or unavailable for forwarding, which is already used in other capabilities of the Redirect Bot service.
Step-by-step guide to starting forwarding
- To forward chat history, the user goes to the desired project, selects the “📜Forward chat history” item and switches the mode from “New posts” to “Old posts”.
- After switching, the period selection buttons become available: from “1 day” and “7 days” to “1 month”, “3 months”, “6 months”, “1 year” and the “All history” option. Select the required period.
- Then click the “Start” button.
- In the “Status” section you can track the progress of the task.
All previously configured project settings are automatically applied to the forwarding of old messages as well: you can remove links from posts, forward only entries with specific keywords, filter messages by author ID, use stop words and stop senders, leaving only truly relevant content in the target chat. Thanks to this, history forwarding works like a “smart filter” rather than simple copying: you immediately get a clean, filtered feed of old messages, perfectly tailored to the new chat or funnel.
Limitations, speed, and practical recommendations
Although there is an “All history” mode in the interface, it is important to realistically assess the size of the chat and the age of the conversation: for example, if the chat is several years old and has tens of thousands of messages, the task may turn out to be too heavy, and the forwarding will either take a very long time or run into Telegram’s technical limitations. The optimal option is to choose reasonable periods such as a day or a month of history: the bot usually processes such volumes without issues and with a minimum number of errors.
The forwarding speed for history is initially set to “balanced”: the bot does not send messages in huge batches but moves gradually from old to new, keeping pauses and bypassing flood‑wait, which is especially important for chats with a large number of media, heavy files, and attachments. The “Status” button in the interface shows how many messages have already been processed and how many are planned in total, so the user always sees live progress, and after the forwarding is completed, the feature automatically returns to the standard mode and again accepts only new messages.
Highlights, safety, and ethics of use
The main advantage of history forwarding in Redirect Bot is the ability to pull even complex, “protected” content that cannot be simply forwarded manually, saved via the client, or properly screenshotted. Moreover, if you joined a chat with history already hidden and the standard Telegram client does not show what happened before you joined, the bot can still export those old messages thanks to the connected account and its own algorithms for working with the Telegram API.
However, this technical power also brings responsibility: you cannot just steal someone else’s content, violating copyright and Telegram’s rules, so this feature should primarily be used for your own chats, your own private channels, internal training materials, and other legal purposes.
The Redirect Bot team emphasizes the importance of respecting copyright and recommends using the chat history forwarding feature for backups, migrations, and educational purposes, not for mass copying and selling paid materials from other communities.
