Disappearing messages
For senders and recipients — how “Opens once” and expiry dates work, what the labels mean, and why a file can be refused a lifetime.
A message can be set to open once, to stop opening on a date, or both. Either can be set on a free message or a paid one, by whoever is sending it.
Setting a lifetime
When you send the message, choose either or both:
- Opens once — the recipient can open it one time.
- An expiry — after that moment it stops opening. The expiry has to be at least 5 minutes and at most 30 days away.
If the expiry is wrong you are told which rule it broke:
- “Give the expiry as a date, or leave it out.”
- “Give them at least five minutes to open it.”
- “The longest a message can be set to expire in is 30 days.”
Why it sometimes says the file can be opened elsewhere
If you try to put a lifetime on a file the recipient can already open from another live message, it is refused:
This member can already open this file from another message, so it cannot be sent with a lifetime
This is not a bug. Access on EVVA is granted per file, while a lifetime is set per message. Burning one message would not stop the other message serving the same file, so a promise that the file disappears could not be kept — and EVVA refuses to make a promise it cannot keep.
To send that file with a lifetime, delete the other message that carries it first, or send a different file.
The labels you will see
Who triggers the burn
The recipient’s app reports the open at the moment it shows you the file. From then on the file stops being served, and that cannot be undone.
“Opens once” controls whether EVVA keeps serving the file. It cannot control what somebody did while it was on their screen — a screenshot or a recording is outside what any platform can prevent. Treat it as a lifetime on delivery, not a guarantee of secrecy.
Two things it deliberately does not do:
- A creator looking back at a view-once message they sent does not destroy it.
- Nobody can burn a message that is arriving in somebody else’s chat.
Anything that does not fit the rules — a message that is not yours, one that is already burned, one that does not exist — gets the same not found answer, so the app cannot be used to probe other people’s chats.