For years, end-to-end encryption (E2EE) has been the gold standard for digital privacy. But it has always come with a silent trade-off: when you add a new member to an encrypted chat, they arrive at a blank slate (as in, they can’t see conversation history). Any previous conversation - no matter how vital to their onboarding - remained locked away, accessible only to those who were already there. You start taking the screenshots of the chat to provide the new member with the necessary context and get them up to speed. Sound familiar?
Today, we are changing that. We are thrilled to announce that Element now supports seamless, secure history sharing for new chat members, effectively ending the ‘blank slate’ era of encrypted collaboration (more on this here). Whether it’s a new colleague getting up to speed on a project, a person you simply forgot to invite to a new chat, or a community member joining a long-running discussion, you no longer have to worry about whether they have the context they need.
By combining the rigour of Matrix’s decentralised, secure architecture with the seamless experience users expect from modern messaging, we’re proving that you don't have to choose between strong security and fluid collaboration.
The challenge of "locked" history
In a standard E2EE environment, messages are encrypted with keys that are only distributed to the participants present at the time the message is sent. When a new person joins, they simply don’t possess the cryptographic keys needed to unlock the chat history.
For many users, this felt less like a security feature and more like a broken experience. Organisations and communities were often forced to choose: keep history visible but unencrypted, or keep it encrypted but siloed from new joiners. Neither was the ideal solution. If you forgot to invite a person to a new chat, got a new team member, or a new person joined a working group they couldn’t see the conversation history.
How it works: Privacy by design, convenience by choice
Our new feature bridges this gap without compromising the integrity of your E2EE environment. When a chat admin chooses to allow new members to see historical messages, Element now intelligently and securely shares the necessary historical decryption keys with the new participant when they are invited. Instead of broadcasting history in the clear, we’ve developed a secure mechanism to share key bundles directly with authorised new members.
Chat admins retain full authority. You can decide chat-by-chat whether to enable history sharing, ensuring that sensitive discussions remain protected while collaborative ones become truly productive. Crucially, your data remains end-to-end encrypted. The keys are shared via private, encrypted "to-device" messages, ensuring that the history is never exposed to the homeserver or any third parties.
How to use it?
If you want the history of the chat to be shared with new members, just go to the room’s Privacy & Security settings and set the “Who can read history?” to “Members (full history)”. That’s it.
When creating new encrypted rooms, by default the history is not shared. The room header displays whether the history is shared so the members are aware of it at all times.
A note about existing rooms
If you notice an existing room in which history is shared, but should not be - you can change that in the Security & Privacy settings before inviting new members. Note that according to the Matrix specification, all historical messages should be made visible to new members if the message was sent while room history was set to shared. However, because some rooms may have accidentally had history sharing on without users realising that, there is currently an additional constraint in place that keys for such past messages are only shared with new members when the room is currently set to share history.
Future enhancements
History sharing does not work yet when a user joins a room via a Space proactively. They need to be invited to the room since the keys for the past messages can only be provided by an existing member of the room (the one who invites them).
We’re really pleased with enabling easy, secure history sharing for new chat members. As far as we know, it’s unique to Element. We’d love feedback on your experience of using it; like any new feature it can doubtless be improved and polished as we get insights from our end-users.
