Deleting your Chatstead account

Step 1 — find out whose server you are on

The Chatstead app asks for a server address when you sign in. That address tells you who holds your account. If it belongs to your employer or a group you joined, the administrator of that server can delete your account. If it is a server you run yourself, you are that administrator.

Step 2 — ask that administrator to delete the account

Email or message the person who gave you your Chatstead login and ask them to delete your account. In the admin panel they open Users, find your name and press Delete. It takes a few seconds and no request to us is needed.

If you cannot reach the administrator, email us at hello@chatstead.com and we will help you identify who to contact. We cannot delete an account on someone else’s server ourselves — we have no access to it.

What gets deleted, and what is kept

Deleting an account removes the person from the workspace: they can no longer sign in, they are removed from every group, and their profile stops appearing to other members.

Messages that were already sent stay in the conversations they were sent to, so the remaining members do not lose the middle of their own threads. The server administrator can remove those as well, by purging the conversation from the admin panel — ask them to do this if you want your messages gone too.

Uploaded files and voice messages are removed together with the conversation they belong to when it is purged.

Retention is set by whoever runs the server. Chatstead itself keeps nothing after deletion and has no separate archive.

If you used our public demo

The demo at demo.chatstead.com is wiped and rebuilt automatically every hour. Anything you created there — the account, messages and files — is erased within the hour without you doing anything. If you want it removed sooner, email hello@chatstead.com and we will reset the demo.

Deleting some data without deleting your account

You can delete your own messages from inside the app: press and hold a message, then choose Delete. To have files or whole conversations removed while keeping your account, ask your server administrator.

Questions

Write to hello@chatstead.com. We normally reply within one business day.