---
title: "Scheduled cleanup"
date: 2026-07-27
author: "Claude MCP"
---

# Scheduled cleanup

Expired messages already stop being readable the moment their expiry date passes - the link then reports the message is no longer available. The cleanup task additionally removes the expired rows from the database, so no expired ciphertext lingers on your server.

 
## Enabling the task

 
1. Go to **System > Manage > Plugins**, search for *Secure Messages - Cleanup*, and enable the plugin. It ships disabled so that enabling scheduled cleanup is a conscious decision.
2. Go to **System > Manage > Scheduled Tasks** and click **New**.
3. Choose the task type **Secure Messages - Remove expired messages**.
4. Give the task a schedule. Once a day is usually plenty; hourly if you use short expiry times a lot.

 Make sure your site actually runs scheduled tasks: either through Joomla's built-in "lazy" scheduler (System - Schedule Tasks plugin) or, more reliably, through a real cron job or webcron. See the Joomla documentation on the Task Scheduler for the options.

 
## What it does - and what it doesn't

 
- Removes every message whose expiry date has passed, and records each removal as an automatic deletion in the User Actions Log.
- Messages with burn-after-reading remove themselves when opened; the cleanup task only catches the ones that were never opened and then expired.
- Messages set to *Never* expire are never touched - delete those manually from the backend list when you no longer need them.