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If you don’t want messages in your secret chats to hang around forever, Telegram lets you set self-destruct timers to permanently remove them. After a message is received, it remains in the chat for a predetermined period — you can choose times between one second and one week – before disappearing. All premium users get a Premium special badge that appears next to their name in the chat list, chat headers, and member lists in groups – showing that they help support Telegram and are part of the club that receives exclusive features first. Since an update in 2019, Telegram has allowed users to delete messages sent by other users, across all devices. It’s a somewhat divisive feature. Having your messages deleted by someone else doesn’t feel very good. But if your conversation is between you and a person you trust, it’s another handy way to control your online communications.

You can choose to share either your current or your live location. Send My Current Location will provide a one-time update about where you are. As you can see in the below image, the app lets you manually change this before sending, so don't trust locations blindly. In addition to manually selecting a point on the map, you can choose a nearby place from a list. Stop Being Added to Random Groups Telegram may be among the most popular messaging services in the world, yet there are still many who don’t know what it’s all about. The app is often name-dropped in discussions regarding online privacy and security, but aren’t all messaging apps secure? Don’t more popular apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger (despite their ties to Facebook) also have the fabled “end-to-end” encryption? What makes Telegram so special? If you prefer keeping the sensitive content of your chats limited to yourself and avoiding it from being intercepted by a hacker or the authorities in your country or region, this Telegram trick is for you. While normal chats in Telegram are user-to-server encrypted and cannot be read unless someone breaches Telegram’s servers, Secret Chats take it to a new level by providing user-to-user encryption. These chats are meant to be short-lived and not stored on Telegram’s servers.

Reminder on messaging apps has been one of the most sought-after features and finally, you can use it on Telegram. Recently, WhatsApp partnered with Any.do to bring Reminders, however, Telegram has implemented this feature natively. Though there is one lingering issue. You can only set reminders in the “Saved Messages” section. Type out the task and tap and hold the “send” button. Here, choose “set a reminder” and pick your date and time. Telegram will send a reminder notification just like Google Calendar or other task management apps. While the feature is good, we would have loved it more had it been available for user chats too. To lock your messages, go to “Settings”, “Privacy and Security” and tap on “Passcode Lock”. You will be asked to set a four-digit passcode and confirm it. Once you do that, you will find additional options to “unlock the app with fingerprint” and “auto-lock” it after a specific duration. If you like to customize your favorite chats, there is a good chance that you would appreciate custom sounds. What makes it so handy is the ability to let you set any short audio clip from a chat as a notification sound. It will make it a bit more convenient for you to identify the alerts from a specific Telegram chat. Keep in mind that the audio clip must be less than 5 seconds and up to 300KB in size. You can also customize your chat background image in “Chat Background” in Chat Settings.

Telegram Proxy Options While all Telegram chats are client-server encrypted, default chats are still stored on Telegram's servers. This conveniently allows you to access your messages on multiple devices, but it might raise privacy concerns.