Most forwarding bots must be added to the source as an admin — impossible in someone else's channel. TgRelay reads the source through your own connected Telegram account, so any channel or group that account is a member of can feed your channel automatically.
Sign in with Telegram, then connect the account that will read the sources. We recommend a separate secondary account rather than your main one.
Make sure that account is a member of the channel or group you want to forward from. Admin rights in the source are not needed.
Pick the source from the account's chats, choose your target channel, set filters and decide between a forward and a clean copy.
A Telegram bot only sees channel posts where it has been made an administrator. In a channel you do not run, nobody will give your bot that role, so bot-based forwarders stop at your own channels. A user account works differently: it receives every message of the chats it has joined, just like the Telegram app on your phone. TgRelay uses this to forward messages from a Telegram channel without admin rights — the account only has to be a member.
The service sees exactly what the connected account sees, nothing more. Public channels and groups work once the account joins them; private ones work if the account has been invited or approved. If the account leaves a chat or loses access to it, forwarding from that chat stops — there is no other way in. Your own channels can still go through our bot, which needs admin rights only in your channel and no account login at all.
Use a dedicated account that exists only to read sources, and keep your personal chats out of it. Each customer's accounts, channels and forwardings are isolated from other users. For large channels where instant delivery is unreliable, switch the forwarding to scheduled checks every 10, 30 or 60 seconds so no post is missed.