How to “Leave your chats in the archive”

Especially on vacation, the abundance of incoming messages on the smartphone can be annoying. We’ll show you how to put groups and individual chats into vacation mode with WhatsApp’s “Leave chats in archive” feature.

There are groups on WhatsApp that you would just like to leave. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, this is usually not that easy.

It can be particularly annoying when the cell phone keeps ringing while on vacation because a long discussion has broken out in one of these groups. But WhatsApp offers a remedy here – with the vacation mode.

WhatsApp: How does vacation mode work?

The setting for the WhatsApp vacation mode is officially called “Leave chats in the archive” in the app. Setting up this option took the Meta subsidiary several years of development time.

To switch WhatsApp to vacation mode and, for example, banish the work group from view, you can simply move it to your archive.

The works very simply. On iOS, you have to slide the corresponding chat to the left in your overview. The Archive function opens directly here. With Android you have to hold the respective chat for a long time.

With the “Leave chats in the archive” function, the groups will no longer pop up in your regular chats if there are new messages there.

This is how you can keep your chats in the archive

You can find the settings for the WhatsApp vacation mode in different ways. The first way to keep your archived chats in the archive in the future is via the settings.

To do this, click on Settings in WhatsApp and then navigate to Chats. Here you will find the item “Leave chats in the archive” and you can activate it.

But you can also access this setting in your chat overview. Because your archive is pinned above your active chats. If you click on “Archived” here, you will first land on your archived chats.

At the top of the archive you can see which setting you have just activated. Here it says, for example: “These chats remain in the archive when new messages are received.”

If you click on this message, you will return to your settings. Here you can view or change your settings as described above.

Vacation mode on WhatsApp

In addition to the archive method, you can of course also mute individual groups or chats for a certain period of time. WhatsApp offers three different time slots for muting here:

However, if you don’t just want to mute certain chats on WhatsApp, you have another option. Because with the app, the notifications can also be completely switched off in the smartphone settings.

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