How Do You Delay a Forwarded Telegram Message?

One delay for the whole rule

The simplest form is a single wait applied to every message the rule relays: publish, wait, deliver. The maximum is one hour, and that ceiling is deliberate rather than arbitrary — a delay longer than that starts to behave like a scheduler, and a message held for hours has usually stopped being worth relaying.

The wait happens after the filters, so a message that would be dropped is dropped immediately rather than held for nothing.

A different delay for each destination

Each destination can have its own timing instead. Deliver to the first at once, to the second after five minutes, to the third after twenty: one rule, three arrival times.

There is a detail here worth stating because it is the thing that would otherwise go wrong. Destinations are served one after another, so waiting the full delay of each in turn would add them up, and a destination set to twenty minutes sitting behind one set to five would receive at twenty-five. Instead the destinations are sorted by their delay and only the difference is waited each time, so each one receives at the minute you wrote, not at the sum of everything before it.

What it is used for

• Tiered access: the paying group receives immediately, the free one later.
• A review window: time to notice a mistake at the source and delete it before it reaches your audience.
• Spacing out a busy source so a destination does not receive twelve messages in one burst.
• Timing across time zones, when a delay of a few minutes puts delivery on the right side of an hour.

What a delay does not do

If a message is edited at the source while the delay is running and edit sync is on, the destination receives the edit as usual once the copy exists.

• It does not schedule to a clock time. It counts from the moment the message is published, not to a fixed hour.
• It does not queue indefinitely: an hour is the ceiling for both forms.
• It does not hold a message that a filter has already dropped.
• It does not change the order of messages: they are relayed in the order they were published.

Which plans include it

Delayed relaying is part of the paid plans, from Smart upwards. Giving each destination its own timing needs more than one destination, so it becomes useful on the plans that allow several. The plan comparison is on the pricing page.