Soft-delete and restore

When a console user deletes a lead, the platform performs a soft-delete — the lead is hidden from views but the record is retained in the database. This protects against accidental deletes (the most common operator mistake) and gives operators a way to recover data even days or weeks later.

There’s no hard-delete (permanent erasure) exposed in the public UI today.

What “delete” actually does

When a user clicks the delete control on a lead:

1. A confirmation prompt asks “Delete this lead?”
2. On confirm, the lead is marked deleted (a deletedAt timestamp is set) and removed from default views.
3. An “Undo” notification appears at the bottom of the screen for ~10 seconds.

If the user clicks Undo within that window, the delete is reverted. If they don’t, the lead remains in the soft-deleted state.

Recovering a soft-deleted lead

After the undo window expires:

• The deletion persists as far as the user is concerned — the lead doesn’t appear in the table, in search, or in lead-pool exports.
• The record itself is not gone. An operator can restore it by querying the underlying database (or, eventually, via an operator-only restore UI).

If a customer reports “my leads are missing”, run through this checklist:

1. Filter view: did the user apply a filter that’s hiding the leads? (The most common cause.)
2. Wrong pool: leads in a different pool than the user is looking at.
3. Soft-deleted: an operator (or a misbehaving automation) deleted the leads.

For case 3, the operator team can restore. Note that pre-conversion leads tend to attract accidental deletes — operators sometimes treat “won” or “lost” leads as “done” and delete them, which doesn’t preserve historical data the customer might want later.

Why no hard-delete

Hard-delete in the UI is a footgun. The number of users who genuinely want permanent erasure is small; the number who want “remove this lead from my view” is many. Defaulting to soft-delete handles the common case safely and lets the rare permanent-erasure request go through a deliberate operator-mediated path.

GDPR right-to-erasure requests do require hard-delete. Those are operator-handled today; the procedure isn’t documented yet but lives in the operator’s runbook.

Customer-facing messaging

When a customer asks “Can I delete this lead?”, the right answer is:

Deletion in RocketLead is soft — the lead is hidden but recoverable. If you need a hard delete (e.g. GDPR erasure), let us know and we’ll handle it. For everyday tidying, just delete.

This usually puts the customer at ease about accidental deletes and unblocks them.

What’s next

• Runs vs. Steps — the automation-engine observability primer.