Show HN: imessage-exporter, a CLI app and library

This is quite nice.<p>iMessage doesn&#x27;t keep your whole message history on-device. You can scroll back and it will fetch a bit more each time, but that&#x27;s it.<p>Is there anyway to pull back to the beginning of time into the local database? I&#x27;d like to retrieve some specific old messages from a friend who has passed away. If I could get them out I could search (I know what I am looking for) but it would involve an unfeasible amount of &quot;pull to fetch more&quot;

The image on the readme that talks about what the product does is a really nice way to do that - and in fact it&#x27;s better than talking about what the product does because it&#x27;s an example of an actual export - thanks for making this and for having a great readme

I&#x27;ve been using TouchCopy for years, it supports encrypted backups as well. Not as nice as an open source tool, but it does work and it seems to get all the messages, attachments, everything. It does cost a little money, but it&#x27;s been the only reliable thing that continues to work.

For anyone wondering, you can search your iMessages on iPhone by going to the message app, pull down and type what you want in the search bar on top.

It&#x27;s downright criminal that apple doesn&#x27;t provide tools to backup and archive imessages. I have like 40gb of messages on my phone that I do not want to delete, but I don&#x27;t need them on my phone.

Oh this looks great! I’ve crudely been querying the iMessage’s chat.db to export convos to txt files so this is a much more elegant option

iMessage... why they refuse to permit users to file, tag, archive, print &amp; share messages is a mystery to me. More and more of my clients want to communicate via text message.

Dealing with iMessage threads during Discovery was a nightmare. I wish I knew about this tool when I needed it

Hey can this merge two iMessage databases? I have one from an old machine and TimeMachine biffed something, so now I have two copies I&#x27;d like to combine.

I&#x27;ve used this several times - it&#x27;s really very good.

Nice, but it needs continuous integration!<p>Something that runs in docker container on my home server. If my phone gets stolen, I have 1 hour old backup....