Deleting a Team Does Not Remove Its Custom Conversation Views (Which May Become Owner-Only)

Overview

When a Team is deleted in Kayako, the Team record itself is removed, and references to it are cleared from active SLAs, triggers, and other automation rules. However, deleting a Team does not automatically delete two other things that may still reference it:

• Conversations that were previously assigned to that Team (or to its agents) are not deleted or reassigned.
• Custom conversation Views that use the deleted Team as a filter criterion (for example, a view built to show "all conversations assigned to Team X") are not deleted. The view continues to exist as a separate object and keeps returning any conversations that still match its filter.

This means agents may continue to see a view in their sidebar, and conversations tied to the "deleted" team, well after the Team itself has been removed from Administration.

There is a second, related behavior that can make this more confusing. When a Team is deleted, any Views that were shared through that Team can have their sharing/visibility setting automatically reset — commonly to "Just myself", tied to whichever individual agent account originally owned or created the view. The view and its filter (still referencing the now-deleted Team) are left in place; only the sharing setting changes.

A view set to "Just myself" can be seen and managed only by the specific agent account that owns it — not by other administrators, even Owner-level accounts. As a result, an administrator who did not create the view may search Administration → Views and legitimately find nothing, even though the view still exists, is still enabled, and is still visible to its owner.

Solution or Explanation

If custom views (or their filtered conversations) continue to appear after a Team is deleted, the general resolution is as follows:

1. Identify the view(s) that were built using the deleted Team as a filter. These are typically Custom (not System) views and remain flagged as enabled and removable even though the underlying Team is gone.
2. Determine the view's sharing/visibility setting and owner. If the view's visibility is "Just myself," it will not appear in Administration → Views for any account other than its specific owner — this includes other administrator or Owner-role accounts.
3. Delete the view using the owning account. There are two ways to do this:
   • Have the agent who owns the view sign in with their own account (with the "Manage views" permission) and delete it directly from Administration → Views.
   • If troubleshooting requires impersonation, make sure to request approval to impersonate that specific owning agent's account — not just any administrator account — since only the owner can access a "Just myself" view.
4. Once signed in as the owner, go to Administration → Views, locate the view(s) in question, hover over each entry, and select Delete.
5. Optionally, clean up any remaining conversations still assigned to the deleted Team. Deleting the view does not reassign these conversations. Use the following search syntax in the basic or advanced search window to locate them:

   in:conversations team:TeamName

Replace TeamName with the name of the deleted Team. Each returned conversation can then be manually reassigned to an active Team or agent.

This is expected product behavior rather than a defect: Team deletion, View deletion, and conversation reassignment are treated as independent actions in Kayako, and none of them cascades automatically into the others.

Example

A Team named "Projects" is deleted, along with an associated Team named "Info." Custom conversation views that had been filtering on those two Team IDs remain in the system as enabled views. Because the deletion also reset each view's sharing to "Just myself" under the agent who originally created them, an administrator who did not create the views is unable to locate or delete them from their own account — even though the views are still visible, and still returning matching conversations, for the original creator. Signing in as the original creator (or impersonating that specific account with appropriate approval) and deleting the views from Administration → Views resolves the issue.

Verification

After the view is deleted by its owning account:

• The view no longer appears in Administration → Views for any account.
• The view no longer appears in the agent sidebar/navigation.
• Conversations that were only surfaced through that view are no longer grouped under it (though any conversations still assigned to the deleted Team remain until manually reassigned or found via the search syntax above).

Additional Notes

• Deleting a view requires an administrator account with the Manage views permission.
• A view set to "Just myself" cannot be seen or modified by anyone other than its owner from the admin panel or the agent area — this is standard Kayako view-sharing behavior, not specific to Team deletion.
• If impersonation is used to troubleshoot this scenario, confirm you are impersonating the correct owning agent account, not merely any administrator, or the "Just myself" view will still be inaccessible.
• If a view does not show a Delete option after these steps, or if conversations continue to reappear under an active Team with the same name as a previously deleted one, further investigation of view/filter configuration is warranted before concluding the behavior is unresolved.

References

• Searching or Retrieving Conversations from a Deleted Team
• Managing Conversation Views
• Unable to See or Access a View