How to Store Telegram Message IDs Correctly

When you program a bot, you'll often need to refer to messages by their IDs—so it's useful to know that these IDs work differently depending on the chat type.

Store message IDs together with the chat ID and chat type. The same number may mean different things in different chats.

Treat channels and supergroups as per-chat sequences

In channels and supergroups, message IDs are unique per chat: the first message has ID = 1, the second message has ID = 2, and so on.

Supergroups are a special kind of group with enhanced features that appear like regular groups in the user interface; we'll cover them in more detail later in the book.

Treat PM and regular groups as bot-local sequences

In personal dialogs and regular groups, there are no common message IDs. Instead, messages are numbered separately for each participant. For a bot, this means that the first message it either received or sent in any PM or group has ID = 1, the second one has ID = 2, and so on.

Keep service message IDs

Although service messages (such as “A user entered the chat” or “The chat title has changed”) don't look like normal messages in the UI, they're still messages and have their own IDs.

TELEGRAM API

Use Telegram API if the bot needs to retrieve a message by ID. Bot API doesn't provide this feature.