On your phone everything has been working for ages, but on your computer Telegram just sits on "Connecting..." and doesn't show a single new message. You open the settings and look for Data and Storage, like on your phone, and you find downloads and auto-download there, but nothing with the word "proxy" in it. Then you search for how to set up a Telegram proxy on a PC, and half the answers say it can't be done on a computer at all, while the other half tell you to download some program, with an .exe sitting on a file-sharing site right next to it.
Let me say right away that we sell proxies ourselves, so I'm hardly a neutral party. But our part comes at the very end. The button labels in this article are taken from Telegram's own English interface strings, and I also looked at how this works in the apps' code.
Which Telegram you have on your computer
You don't need a separate program for the proxy. Telegram's help page says plainly that all its mobile and desktop apps can connect through a proxy on their own. But the path in the settings depends on which app you actually have open.
Telegram Desktop is one and the same app on Windows, Linux and Mac, and on Windows and Linux there are no other official options. In it the proxy sits under "Advanced", in the "Data and storage" block, only the item is called "Connection type", and the word "proxy" isn't in its name. On a Mac you might also have the native Telegram, made only for macOS, and there the proxy is right in "Data and Storage", and the item is simply called "Use Proxy". If you installed the app from the App Store, they're easy to tell apart: Telegram Desktop is called Telegram Lite there, and the native app is called just Telegram.
Telegram Web in the browser won't help here, because it doesn't support proxies.
You don't need to install any program either - you get the app from the official site desktop.telegram.org. I wouldn't run a file from a file-sharing site that calls itself a proxy, because there's no way to check from the outside what's inside it. And you don't need your Telegram login code to connect a proxy, and you should never share it with any services or apps at all.
The easiest way is to hand Telegram a link
A proxy usually comes as a link like t.me/proxy?server=…&port=…&secret=…, and sometimes it starts with tg://proxy?. Telegram Desktop recognises these links by itself, and on a computer you have three ways to pass one to it:
- Click the link right in a Telegram chat, for example the one you forwarded it to from your phone.
- Drag the link into the Telegram Desktop window. The app will show a hint: "Connect to a proxy" and "Drop the link here".
- Copy the link, open "Settings" → "Advanced" → "Connection type", click the menu icon at the top of that window and choose "Add proxy from clipboard". The proxy is added to the list and turned on straight away, and no confirmation window appears.
If the link opened in your browser, what happens next varies. With some links you'll see a Telegram page with a button that passes the link to the app. With others the browser just sends you to the telegram.org home page, and there's no button. In that case copy the link, paste it into any chat in Telegram itself and click it there. Then Telegram Desktop shows the "Enable proxy" window with the rows "Server", "Port" and "Secret", and all you have left to do is click "Connect Proxy".
In the same window the "Status" row has "Check Status", and before the first check Telegram honestly warns you: "This will expose your IP address to the admin of the proxy server." The owner of an MTProto proxy really can see which IP you connect from and when, although they can't read your messages or identify your account. That's why Telegram advises using proxies only from a source you trust. Where these links come from in the first place, we went through in our article about Telegram proxies.
If you got an address, a port and a secret instead of a link
Sometimes a proxy arrives not as a link but as three lines: server, port and secret. In Telegram Desktop you enter them by hand:
- Open "Settings" → "Advanced" → "Connection type".
- Choose "Use custom proxy". By default it's set to "Use system proxy settings", which means Telegram uses the proxy set up in your system, if there is one. If your proxy list is still empty, the window for adding one opens by itself, and you won't need to click "Add proxy" in step 3.
- Click "Add proxy" and choose the MTPROTO type.
- Put the server address into "Hostname", the number into "Port", and the secret into "Secret".
While the list is empty, the window says "Your saved proxy list will be here." And once there's more than one proxy in the list, "Auto-switch proxies" appears there, so if the current proxy stops working, the app switches to another one.
In the list of types you'll also see SOCKS5, HTTP and WEB. The WEB type appeared in Telegram Desktop at the end of August 2026, and Telegram itself warns that such a proxy runs a web page from its provider in the background. I'm still keeping an eye on it, so we'll see.
The native Telegram for macOS has a different path: "Settings" → "Data and Storage", the "CONNECTION TYPE" block, the "Use Proxy" item. Inside there's "Add Proxy" and "Export link from clipboard" (yes, that's the exact wording of the English string), there are only two types, SOCKS5 and MTPROTO, and the "Use for Calls" switch is inactive there with an MTProto proxy. Once at least one proxy has been added, a separate "Proxy" item appears in the main settings list. This app will also ask whether to add the proxy when you open a link, only its buttons are labelled differently.
How to tell the proxy is working, and what to do if it isn't
Look at the status in the proxy list. The proxy Telegram is connecting through right now shows "online" if everything works, or "connecting…" while the connection is in progress. The other proxies in the list show a different status: "available (ping: … ms)" if the server responds, or "not available". And in "Advanced", next to "Connection type", you'll see "Connecting through proxy..." while it connects.
When a proxy is on, Telegram Desktop shows a proxy icon in the bottom left corner of the chat list, and clicking it opens the proxy list.
If your proxy's "connecting…" never turns into "online", or a proxy in the list says "not available", it usually means the server on the other end isn't responding, and you can't fix that in Telegram's settings. Then all that's left is to message whoever gave you the link, or add another proxy.
There's also a longer message: "Your Telegram Desktop version doesn't support this proxy type or the proxy link is invalid. Please update Telegram Desktop to the latest version." Here Telegram itself tells you the way out. Update the app from the official site and open the link again, and while you're at it, check that the whole link got copied.
You can move a proxy from your computer to your phone without forwarding anything, because Telegram Desktop can show it as a QR code ("Share proxy with QR code"). On the phone the proxy settings are in a different place, but with the QR code you won't have to type in the address, port and secret all over again. And to turn the proxy off on your computer, go to the same "Connection type" and pick "Disable proxy".
And now, as promised, about us
FreeGate is a personal MTProto proxy, and it connects the same way, with a link, no separate app. You sign up with an email and a password, choose a plan and the number of devices, and then, as our site puts it, you tap "Connect in Telegram" or scan the QR code, Telegram asks about the proxy, and you tap "Connect Proxy". The connection is disguised as ordinary HTTPS. The proxy works only inside Telegram, so your browser and banking apps go online as usual, and we can't see your messages, because Telegram encrypts them itself.
It works in the official Telegram apps for Windows, macOS and Linux. You can try it for free: 1 day after you sign up with your email and confirm your address, with no payment and no automatic charges. After that it's $1.00 for 30 days or $2.50 for 90 days, price per device (as shown on the site on 18 October 2026). A phone and a computer count as 2 devices, and each one gets its own link, which you can change in your account with one tap if it leaks. Plans and sign-up are at freegate.app/world.