Telegram auto forward means new posts in one chat are sent on to another chat without you touching them. Telegram itself has no setting for this, which is why people end up adding forwarding bots or running scripts. This is coming to TelegramBuddy but is not built yet — join the waitlist below for early access. When it launches, you will be able to set a rule once in the desktop app and have it pass new posts along from your own account.
The rest of this page describes how it is planned to work, who it is for, and where the line sits on what should and should not be forwarded.
What Telegram auto forward in TelegramBuddy will do
The idea is a simple rule with three parts:
- Source — a channel, group or chat your account can read.
- Optional processing — which posts count, and how they are sent.
- Destination — a channel, group or chat your account can post in.
Once the rule is on, each new post in the source that matches will appear in the destination. You will be able to choose between a plain forward, which keeps Telegram’s “Forwarded from” header, and a copy, which posts the same text and media as a new message. Copy mode is intended for content you own or have the right to republish.
Filtering is planned as its own feature, so a rule will be able to pass on only posts with certain words, from certain authors or of certain media types. That is covered on the keyword filter page.
Who it is for
- Channel owners running more than one channel. Post once in your main channel and have it appear in a regional or backup channel you also run.
- Teams. Send announcements from a staff channel into a wider group without someone copying them across by hand.
- Readers who follow a few sources. Pass posts from channels you read into a private channel of your own, so they sit in one place. Combining many sources into one feed is its own planned page: the feed aggregator.
- People moving to a new channel. New posts can keep flowing into the new home while the old one winds down. For the older history, see copying a Telegram channel.
How it is planned to work
- Sign in to TelegramBuddy with your own Telegram account, the same way the app works today: a QR code or your phone number, plus your own api_id and api_hash from my.telegram.org. This guide shows where to get them.
- Create a rule: pick the source chat and the destination chat. Private chats you are a member of will work the same way as public ones.
- Choose forward or copy, and add filters if you want only some posts.
- Turn the rule on. New matching posts will be sent to the destination.
- Pause, edit or delete the rule at any time.
Exactly where rules run — only while the app is open, or in some other way — is not final. We will say plainly how it works before anyone relies on it.
Details that matter
- It will only see what you see. Rules run from your account, so the source has to be a chat you can open, and the destination has to be one where you are allowed to post. There is no separate bot that needs to be added or given admin rights.
- Protected chats stay protected. If a channel owner has switched on “Restrict saving content”, that is the owner saying the material should not leave the chat. TelegramBuddy will not forward from those chats. If you have a real reason to need the content, ask the owner.
- Copy mode is for your own material. Removing the “Forwarded from” header on someone else’s posts makes them look like yours. Use copy mode for channels you run or content you are licensed to repost.
- Telegram’s rate limits still apply. Telegram sometimes asks apps to slow down. The app already handles this for downloads by waiting and then continuing, and forwarding is planned to behave the same way.
How it compares to the usual options
| Forwarding by hand | Forwarding bots | TelegramBuddy (planned) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Setup | none | add a bot, often give it rights | a rule in a desktop app |
| Which chats it can read | yours | only chats the bot is in | chats your account can read |
| Account used | yours | the bot’s, or a service holding your session | yours, session kept on your computer |
| Effort per post | one action every time | none | none once the rule is on |
Hand forwarding is fine for the occasional post and gets tiresome fast. Bots need to be added to the source, which you usually cannot do in someone else’s channel, and some cloud services work by holding a login to your account on their side. TelegramBuddy’s approach today is that your session stays in a file on your own computer, and the plan is to keep it that way for forwarding.
What you can do today
Forwarding is not there yet, but the rest of the app is. You can open any chat your account can see, including private ones by invite link or t.me/c/ link, browse its full history, and download its media in bulk. If you want to keep a channel’s older posts somewhere safe while you wait, export the chat to HTML or JSON.
Join the waitlist below and we will let you know when Telegram auto forward is ready to try.