Secret Trove of Unread PMs on Facebook Messenger

STATES CHRONICLE – Even though you most likely made a Facebook account in order to socialize, even if just with friends you already knew, the way you use the social media platform has definitely changed over time. As even Facebook acknowledged, people have been sharing less and less information on the platform, enough to inspire some worry into the company’s heads of design.

But even if the social media network was designed to help you keep in touch with friends, it kind of did a terrible job with that, at least for some friends. Why, you ask? Well, in this case it’s because you might have a secret trove of unread PMs on Facebook Messenger, some from friends you haven’t yet added.

This is mainly because Facebook is trying to protect from any unwanted spam, and some of the messages in that folder are definitely spam, but others might actually be from people that you once knew and that have been trying, unsuccessfully, to contact you. And you yourself might have had similar messages ignored because the person you sent them to didn’t really ever receive them.

If you’ve read this far, I’m assuming you’d like to know how exactly to access that secret trove. So, let’s dive right into that, but not before a short warning. You might find very few messages, most of them spam, or you could get plenty of messages from friends you unknowingly ignored; or anything in-between.

There are two ways to go about this, depending on whether you’re using the Facebook Messenger app or the browser version. So here goes:

For the mobile app, you have to go to the Settings option, represented by either a gear icon or by a person’s bust inside a white circle. From there, click on the People tab and check the options inside. You have to select Message Requests, and you’ll see a few messages, but you’re not quite there yet.

All you have to do now is to click on See Filtered Requests, and that’s it – all the messages you’ve been sent on Facebook but didn’t receive. Have fun rekindling friendships, or most likely trying to explain to people why you haven’t returned their PM in the past two years.

The browser version is even easier to access. First of all you have to go to Facebook and click on the Messages icon at the top right of the screen. You open the drop-down list and then press See All. As the new page opens, you’ll see a More option on the left of the screen, above the messages. You then have to click on the tab and select Filtered.

And that’s pretty much it for how to access the messages you’ve never received over the years you’ve had a Facebook account. So you can either curse the company’s software for costing you opportunities, or you can thank it for sparing you of having to read messages you never cared about in the first place. Either way, have fun!

Image source: Flickr