Can Instagram Inbox messages be auto-deleted without deleting the contact?

On 3, that one I can answer with confidence. Deleting a contact in a third party tool only deletes that tool's copy. Meta's copy of the Instagram thread sits in Meta's systems and is untouched, and Instagram's messaging API has no delete endpoint for DMs, so no third party tool could remove it even if it wanted to. Clearing Meta's copy is a separate manual action in the Instagram inbox, and even then it only clears the thread from your side. The sender still has it on theirs.

On 1, the closest thing I found is an older community thread asking the same question, where the answer was that there's no way to delete the chat conversation through ManyChat, with a suggestion to ask support about workarounds: https://community.manychat.com/general-q-a-43/deletion-chat-converstion-after-some-delay-4034. I haven't seen anything since that changes it. If you need this for a DPIA or a records schedule, get the answer from support in writing rather than relying on a forum post, mine included.

On 2, I couldn't confirm from the docs whether the JSON has message bodies or only profile, fields and tags. Faster than waiting on support: take one test contact, send a free text message into that thread from a second account so there's real body content in it, then run Download Contact Data and open the file. Whatever is in there is your answer, and you end up with an artifact you can attach to your documentation.

One thing worth flagging given how you framed it. Buttons only in the flow doesn't limit what arrives. If someone types free text into the DM, that message hits the webhook and gets stored by whatever is subscribed to it, regardless of what your automation asks for. So retention here is a platform question, not a flow design question.

Hope you get it sorted.

Thank you — this is extremely helpful, particularly the distinction between what you can confirm and what you think still warrants a written answer from support.

The older thread on conversation deletion is exactly the kind of precedent I was looking for. My specific need is to retain the contact record, tags, fields and analytics while routinely expiring the actual Inbox conversation content, so deleting the entire contact doesn't solve it. I'll keep that question open and seek written confirmation from ManyChat support about whether anything has changed since that 2024 answer or whether there is now any workaround/API capability for message-only deletion.

Your suggestion for #2 is excellent, I'll create that test contact. That should give me a concrete artifact showing what ManyChat currently exports.

And thank you for the clarification on #3 and for emphasizing that retention is a platform issue even when the automation itself requests no free text.

One follow-up, if you happen to know: have you seen any ManyChat setting or account-level retention control that automatically ages out Inbox conversation history after a specified period while leaving the underlying contact intact? I suspect the answer is no based on the older thread, but I'd like to distinguish “no selective deletion action” from “no configurable retention policy” before I close that possibility.

Thanks again — this was very useful.

Not that I've found, and I went looking specifically for that after your first post.

What ManyChat documents publicly is all contact-scoped or account-scoped, nothing in between:
- Delete Contact Data, manual, per contact, takes the whole record including Inbox history.
- Account closure, which purges everything within 90 days.
- Inactive account rules under their ToS.

Nothing that expires Inbox content on a schedule while the contact stays. Worth being precise about what that means though: I can only speak to what's documented, and absence of documentation is not proof the setting doesn't exist somewhere in account config. Your two-way split is the right way to put the question to support, because those are genuinely different answers and they'll likely respond to the first one and consider it handled.

One thing worth naming before you ask, so they don't offer it as the solution: Delete Contact exists as an action you can put inside a flow, so it can fire automatically on a delay. That is the closest thing they have to automated aging-out, and it will probably come up. It fails your requirement for the same reason the manual button does, it takes the contact with it. Ruling it out in your own question saves a round trip.

Same story on the API. The public one is contact-scoped, the /fb/subscriber/ namespace, and I found no documented endpoint for deleting a message or a conversation. So an API workaround lands in the same place the UI does.

If you want this in a form an auditor will accept, ask whether their DPA defines a retention schedule for Inbox content: https://manychat.com/legal/dpa. A processor's retention commitments belong in that document rather than a help article, and if there's a configurable policy anywhere, that's where it should be written down. If it isn't in the DPA, that's close to your answer regardless of what support says in a chat window.