How Do You Keep a Forwarding Destination From Piling Up?

Delete the copy after a while

The copy delivered to your destination can remove itself after a set time: one hour, six hours, twenty-four hours, or seven days. To be plain about what it touches: only the copy your rule created, in your own destination. It never touches the original.

It is not a retraction either: it runs on a timer, not on what the source does. If the source deletes a post and you want the copy gone with it, that is the next setting. Timed deletion is part of the paid plans from Smart upwards.

Mirror the deletions as well

With delete sync on, a message deleted at the source removes the copy from your destination within seconds. The two settings do different jobs: the timer keeps the destination short overall, delete sync follows the source. Together they mean nothing retracted lives on under your name.

The link between an original and its copy is kept for seven days; something deleted later than that stays in the destination.

Forward only while it is useful

Active hours gives the rule its own opening times, in your own time zone. A message that arrives outside the window is not forwarded, and not queued either: it is not held anywhere, and it does not arrive in a burst when the window reopens. Only what is posted after the window opens travels.

A window may cross midnight, so 22:00 to 06:00 runs overnight. It is per rule, which means the window on the alerts channel does not touch another rule that mirrors a source around the clock. Active hours is part of the paid plans from Smart upwards.

Cut the volume before it is delivered

Keyword filters decide what is worth moving at all: a whitelist forwards only messages containing the words you name, and a blacklist drops those with a forbidden one. Length filters deal with the noise no word list can predict: a minimum around 15 to 25 characters removes the one-word replies and every future variant of them, and a maximum keeps essays out of a feed meant to be scanned in seconds.

Filters drop silently, so post a test message that really would pass before trusting the combination.

Stop the repeats

Overlapping sources mean the same alert arriving twice within a minute. Duplicate detection fingerprints every relayed message and drops a new one with the same fingerprint inside the time window, five minutes by default, raised only if you actually see duplicates arriving outside it. It is part of the paid plans from Smart upwards.