Hidden Chats not Hidden

Good day @Justin Thurber

Welcome to Q&A forum!

"Please understand that our forum is a public platform, and we will modify your question to cover your organization domain name in the description. Please notice to hide these personal or organization information next time you post error or some information to protect personal data."  

I have reviewed this issue and found an article mentioning that new messages automatically unhide chats. It means that if someone sends a new message in a hidden chat, Teams will automatically unhide it. This behavior is by design and unfortunately cannot be disabled. You can mute the chat to stop notifications, but it will still appear in your chat list.

Hide, unhide, mute, add a chat to Favorites, or mark a chat as unread in Microsoft Teams

If these people are outside your organization:

I suggest that if you don't want to see certain chats, you refer to the article below on how to block contacts. After blocking them, you can take an extra step to hide the chats from your chat list.

Block or unblock people outside your org in Microsoft Teams

Note: When you block someone, they can no longer communicate with you in Teams or Skype, and they won’t be able to view your status.

This means that if you both block and hide the chat, you will no longer see any messages from that person.

If these people are inside your organization:

Unfortunately, blocking internal organization members is not supported by default in Teams for Business. This feature is off by default and only your IT Admin can block specific users from 1:1 and group chats across the organization.

Accept or block chat requests from people inside your organization in Microsoft Teams

Allow users to block Microsoft Teams chat messages

If the answer is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and kindly upvote it. If you have extra questions about this answer, please click "Comment".

Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.