DeleteAt field in the Posts table

[ashim (Ashim Kapoor)]

Dear all,

I think that the DeleteAt field in the Posts is 0 for a post that is available ie. not deleted. It is marked with the unix timestamp when it is deleted.

I am reading this:

How to delete old messages automatically in a channel?

Hi @MMJJ882 and welcome to the Mattermost forums! Data retention policies are a great way to do that, but they’re not available in the teams edition unfortunately. You can do that directly in the database, if you like, so if it’s only the last 24hrs worth of messages you want to keep, you could run the following query in regular intervals on your database (this is MySQL syntax, not sure what you’re using): update Posts set DeleteAt=unix_timestamp()*1000 where createat < (unix_timestamp()-8640…

This line:

update Posts set DeleteAt=unix_timestamp()*1000 where createat < (unix_timestamp()-86400)*1000 AND DeleteAt != 0; 

should be :

update Posts set DeleteAt=unix_timestamp()*1000 where createat < (unix_timestamp()-86400)*1000 AND DeleteAt = 0;

My understanding is that the above will delete all posts created prior to 24 hours that have not been deleted.

Do I misunderstand ?