How Do You Forward Only the Telegram Messages That Contain Certain Words?

The two lists, and how they work together

• Whitelist: a message is forwarded only if it contains at least one of the words. One match is enough.
• Blacklist: a message is dropped if it contains any of the words. One match is enough to stop it.
• An empty list means no restriction, not "block everything". Leave the whitelist empty and everything passes.
• With both lists set, the whitelist is checked first: the message must contain a wanted word and must not contain a forbidden one.

Capital letters, partial words, and what a match really is

By default the comparison ignores capitalisation, so "signal" matches "Signal" and "SIGNAL". There is a switch to make it strict when you need it, for instance when a ticker in capitals means something different from the same letters in lowercase.

A match is a plain substring: the word "buy" matches inside "buyer" and inside "buyback". That is usually what people want, and occasionally the opposite: if you need boundaries, that is what the regular-expression mode is for.

Screenshots count as text

When reading text inside images is switched on, what is found in the picture is joined to the message before the filters run. A signal published as a screenshot, which used to be invisible to every keyword rule, becomes filterable like any other message. Reading images is part of the AI features and belongs to the Platinum plan.

Combinations that quietly match nothing

Filters do their work in silence: a message that does not pass simply never appears in the destination, and nothing is logged as an error. That is what makes an over-tight rule feel like a broken one.

• A whitelist of words that the source chat never uses. Read ten recent messages and check that at least one would pass.
• The same word in the whitelist and in the blacklist: the blacklist wins, so nothing gets through.
• Strict capitalisation switched on with the keywords typed in lower case, against a channel that writes headlines in capitals.
• A minimum length that is longer than the messages you are trying to catch.

1. Switch every filter off and post a test message in the source chat.
2. If it arrives, the rule is healthy: turn the filters back on one at a time.
3. The one that stops the test message is the one to loosen.

When the pattern is more than a word

There is a regular-expression mode for cases a word list cannot express: a price format, a ticker followed by a number, an entry that must appear at the start of a line. Worth knowing before you turn it on: if the expression is written incorrectly, nothing is skipped and nothing breaks — the filter falls back to a plain text search for the same string. It fails soft, which is safer, but it also means a broken expression can look like it is working.