Send a new text without all the history for that recipient

Question

Whenever I start to compose a new text message on my iPhone 6 to send to someone, as soon as I enter their name in the To: field the last text that I sent or received from them appears in my message editing box. I can add new material at the bottom but cannot delete what was exchanged previously. This is causing my messages to people to keep building up in size with the total message being everything I ever sent to them plus what I'm sending as a new message.

How can I just send them a brand new message without the entire conversation with them over the past year being prepended to it? I don't want to delete the previous messages from cache, just don't want them to be included in the new message.

Answer 1

The history is just for you. Only the message in the box is sent when you send a message, not the entire history. The recipient keeps their own history of messages which is unrelated to your history.

This is not email where a reply to a message includes a quoted copy of the original — each message is self-contained and it's up to the receiver to keep a historical copy of messages, which is what your device is doing for you.

Answer 2

I'm assuming this is iMessage because it happens to me, too. However, when you send a new message, and you see the history, the new message isn't sent with all that history attached. Only your new message is sent, the history is just for you to see.

Answer 3

You're not sending them all the past messages, it's just loading up your past conversation, and your text is the next message in the conversation. You could get it so it doesn't save message histories and then you wouldn't see past messages, or you can have it so it does save messages histories and you do see past messages. But it's just what you see that's different.