The fallout of these circumstances can usually be brushed off easily, but what happens when a message that was intended to be private is seen by someone who, by all means shouldn’t have? We’ve all been in the scenario in which a harmless text message comes in at inconvenient times, whether it be during a staff meeting, while at dinner on a date, or just laying around on a table while you’re busy focusing on other things. Unfortunately, the same devices that make maintaining these relationships so easy, also creates situations that are not so easy to manage. There’s a dark side of course, which you can glimpse on our 11 gadgets to spy on cheating spouses article. Using one dedicated piece of hardware for so many facets of our lives makes staying connected with all of our contacts easy and convenient. We use them for gaming, socializing, work and even dating. Our iPhones are utilized for a wide variety of applications. And if you must, then make sure to take screenshots of your texts or export/print them for safekeeping. Important: If you want to keep messages for proof or remembrance, don’t enable this auto-delete setting. I’d recommend changing message expiration to 30 days if you exchange lots of media-rich messages with your friends and family and your iPhone is low on storage. Messages default to keeping your conversations on the device permanently. If you set message expiration to 30 days, for example, you’ll be warned that all text messages and their attachments on your device that are older than 30 days will be permanently deleted.

Depending on your choice, you might be prompted to confirm it by tapping the Delete button.

Choose for how long you would like to keep the messages on your iPhone: 30 Days, 1 Year, or Forever.

Scroll down and select the Keep Messages option under the Message History heading.

Launch Settings on your iPhone or iPad.

How to set iPhone text messages to automatically delete after a period of time

What most users don’t realize is that deleting a conversation doesn’t remove it immediately from the Messages database on your device. Thankfully, iOS provides a setting for how long to keep messages on your device. This tutorial will teach you how to tell Messages to permanently delete your conversations after 30 days or one year. Needless to say, animated GIFs, pictures, videos, and other media attached to messages can easily clog up your iPhone’s storage, which can be especially problematic on devices with just 16 GB or 32 GB of storage. Like most people, I message my friends and family quite a lot on any given day.

Messages, one of the most frequently used applications on iPhone, stores on your device text messages, iMessages, and any media attached to them.

How to save text messages from iphone 5