How to delete SMS in the smartphone Xiaomi: the complete guide

Today’s Xiaomi smartphone users receive dozens, sometimes hundreds, of messages every day, from bank confirmation codes, notifications from online stores, promotional mailings, or just correspondence with friends. Over time, this amount of data accumulates, making the standard Messages app overloaded and finding the right information tedious, and old SMS take up space in the device’s internal memory, which can indirectly affect overall system performance.

Clearing your email history isn’t just an aesthetic issue, it’s also an important procedure to ensure your digital hygiene. Advertising messages often contain links to phishing sites that can be dangerous if you accidentally click. Regularly removing unnecessary dialogue helps minimize the risks of identity theft. The MIUI operating system, which is installed on all Xiaomi, Redmi and POCO smartphones, provides flexible text messaging management tools.

In this article, we will take a look at all the cleanup options available, from deleting one particular SMS to fully cleaning the messaging database, how to use batch deletion, how to set up automatic cleanup, and what to do if an important message has been erased by mistake, and we will also cover the topic of dealing with junk messages that are automatically filtered by the security system.

Basic ways to delete a single message and dialogue

The simplest and most common scenario is to delete one particular message or the entire dialog with the contact. The interface of the standard MIUI Messages application is intuitive, but there are nuances that depend on the version of the shell. To delete all correspondence with the subscriber, you just need to open the list of dialogs. Find the contact or phone number in the general incoming list.

Once you find the necessary dialogue, you can press the message plate for a long time, and the screen will change, and the top of the screen will be a toolbar with a number indicating the number of items selected, at which point the system will go into editing mode. To erase the correspondence, click on the basket icon, which is usually located in the lower right or upper corner of the screen, and the system will request confirmation of the action, since this process is irreversible by standard means.

If your goal is to delete only one message within the chain, the algorithm is slightly different. Open a dialogue with the person you are talking to. Find a specific text message that needs to be removed. Make a long press on this particular text bubble. It will stand out in a different color than the others. Then use the delete button again. It's important to understand that when you delete one message from the chain, it will disappear only from you; the sender will retain it, because SMS technology does not imply synchronizing read or delete status between devices.

It is important to note that in some versions of Android and MIUI Remove for All is available, but it only works when you use advanced chat features (RCS), When both people are using compatible apps, like Google Messages./MMS removal always locally.

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Use the Do Not Disturb feature for unknown numbers so that spam messages do not disturb you with sound, but immediately fall into the lock folder.

Massive Message Deletion and History Clearing

When you have hundreds of dialogs, you can't delete them one by one, and then you can use the mass deletion feature to select multiple dialogs or all messages at once. To activate this mode, open the Messages app. In the upper right corner of the screen, find the icon with three dots or a tick, depending on the version of MIUI. When you click on it, select "Delete" or "Select all."

Once you activate the selection mode, you can manually tick the dialogs you want to get rid of. This is especially useful if you want to leave important correspondence with your bank or loved ones, but clear the ads from delivery services and stores. The selection is done by touching: the first touch ticks the box, the second ticks it. When the list of items to be cleared is formed, press the delete button. The system will warn you that the selected data will be destroyed without the possibility of recovery through the basket.

There's also a more radical method, which is to clean through the app store settings. Go to Settings → Apps → All Apps → Messages. You can find the "Clean" or "Delete Data" item here. This method removes absolutely all SMS and MMS on the device, including blacklist settings and drafts. Use this method only in extreme cases, such as before selling your phone or when critical errors in the application work.

For users who value order, dialog sorting is available, and the control menu can sort messages by date, size, or unread, which helps them quickly find the "heavy" dialogs with the pictures that occupy the most space and delete them.

Working with Spam folder and blocked numbers

One of the key features of Xiaomi smartphones is built-in spam protection. The system automatically analyzes incoming messages and, if they are marked by many users as advertising or dangerous, moves them to a special folder. This folder can be called Spam, Blocked, or located inside Antivirus. Finding messages in this folder does not mean that they are deleted; they are simply hidden from the user’s eyes, but continue to occupy space.

To access these messages, open the Messages app and click on the menu icon (three dots or gears). Select "Blocked" or "Spam." Here you will see a list of all the filtered messages. You can view their contents to make sure that there are no important notifications among them that were mistakenly marked by the system as spam. Sometimes banks or delivery services change short numbers, and their messages can get into this filter.

To completely clean this area, follow the following steps:

• 📱 Open the “Blocked” or “Spam” folder in the Messages App.
• 🗑️ Click on the “Clear” button or highlight all messages with a long press.
• ✅ Confirm the deletion to permanently erase data from the device.
• ⚙️ If necessary, add the number to the blacklist forever through the lock settings.

Setting up filters automates the process. You can set keywords for which messages will be automatically deleted. For example, if you often receive casino or microloan ads, adding the words "casino", "credit", "win" to the filter will allow the system to send such SMS to the basket immediately, bypassing the main drawer.

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Regularly checking the Spam folder is necessary to avoid forgiving important confirmation codes that may have been erroneously filtered by the system.

Cleaning the cache and freeing up the phone memory

Many users mistakenly assume that text messages take up negligible space, which is true for simple text messages that weigh a few kilobytes. However, modern messages often contain multimedia content: photos, videos, voice recordings and stickers (MMS), which are the kind of dialogues that can grow to hundreds of megabytes, significantly loading the memory of the smartphone. When the memory is full, the phone starts to work slower, and new photos may not be saved.

To analyze the space occupied, MIUI has a built-in Cleanup tool. Run the Security app (green lightning icon) and select Cleanup. The system will analyze the device and show how much space the messages take up. Often you can see the category "Large files" inside the messages. When you click on it, you will see a list of dialogs sorted by the amount of memory you take up.

We recommend regular audits of these "heavy" emails. Often we save the photo to the gallery, but forget that the original remained in the SMS. By deleting such dialogues, you can free up a significant amount of space. Also worth paying attention to the app cache. Cache is temporary files that speed up the program, but can get clogged over time. Cache cleaning is safe and does not delete your personal correspondence, unlike data cleaning.

The process of cleaning the cache looks like this:

• 🔍 Go to Settings. → Annexes → All applications.
• 📩 Find the Messages app (or Google Messages) in the list).
• 💾 Click on "Memory" or "Storage».
• 🧹 Select the “Clear Cache” button without confusing it with “Clear Everything».

After this procedure, the application will start again, and its operation can become more stable, especially if there were hangs when opening dialogs.

Setup to automatically delete old SMS

To avoid manual cleaning, Xiaomi smartphones have an automatic deletion feature, which is a very useful option that allows you to keep order in the background. You can set a limit on the number of messages you save for each dialog. Once the limit is exceeded, the oldest message will be automatically deleted when a new one arrives.

To set up this feature, go to the Messages app settings. They're usually on the way: click three dots in the corner → Settings. Find the "Additional" or "SMS/MMS settings." There'll be "Delete old messages." Activate the switch. Then the system will suggest setting a limit. Standard values are usually 100, 200, 500 or 1000 messages per dialog.

The choice of limit depends on your activity. If you rarely text with a contact, 100 messages will cover several months of communication. For active dialogues, you better set 500 or 1000 so that the story will last longer.

Auto-cleaning works invisibly for the user, you keep receiving and sending messages, and the system itself makes sure that the database does not inflate, and this is especially true for low-end models of Redmi and POCO with a small amount of internal memory, where every megabyte counts.

Recovery of deleted messages and backup

Accidentally deleting an important SMS with a confirmation code or address is a bad situation. Unfortunately, the standard MIUI shell does not have a shopping cart, like in a gallery or notes. You have confirmed the deletion, the data is marked as free space and can be overwritten at any time. However, there is still a chance of recovery if you have synchronized.

The main way to restore is through the cloud service Xiaomi Cloud or Google Drive. If you have SMS sync enabled, your messages are saved on the server. To check this, log into your account through the browser on your computer or in the phone settings. In Xiaomi Cloud, go to the Messages section. If there is your data there, you can restore it by enabling sync on your phone. this can take time and requires a stable Internet connection.

For users who regularly make full system backups, recovery is possible from a local copy. If you backed up through Settings → About Phone → Backup and Restore, when you restore the system from this save point, all the SMS that were at the time of creation of the copy will return.

If synchronization is not enabled, it is extremely difficult to recover messages. There are third-party applications for data recovery, but their effectiveness is not guaranteed, and they often require Root rights, obtaining which can lead to the loss of warranty on the device, so the best strategy is to prevent and regularly back up important data.

Comparison of backup methods:

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

⚠️ Before mass clearing messages, be sure to make sure that there are no two-factor authorization codes among them (2FA) Recovering an account without texting can be very difficult or impossible.