Message Cloud is an add-on for storing copies of all sent messages on your account.
You are hosting the messages on your side and to set this up, you will need a AWS S3 compatible storage service, for example, AWS or Clever Cloud but you can choose any provider you want.
When Message Cloud is activated on your account, you must provide credentials to your storage before any messages can be transfered.
Find your way to Account settings > (Connections) Message Cloud configuration.
Select the level (account/project) you want to store your messages for and save your credentials:
Once enabled, sent messages will be immediately start being copied and saved on your storage and you can verify the setup by viewing the bucket for incoming messages.
Messages sent before activation will not be synchronized.
The open in browser URL and contact message summary will first hand fetch data from your Message cloud storage. If no message is to be found in your storage, the message information stored in Symplify will be fetched instead (the later mean that some placeholder data could be missing).
Message cloud and Data Retention
Data Retention will delete whatever data stored in Symplify for old messages (and contacts). It will however not delete any messages in the Message Cloud (you decide when and what to delete on your storage).
In other words, purged messages in Symplify are deleted but when you host your own message storage you will still be able to get older content from there (not via the obs-URL though since this is depending on a message and a contact).
Reach out to your success manager to learn more!