Messages Blank in Apple Messages (Yosomite)

Hello pdt2358,

No, I've not fixed this. I've also not tried reinstalling Mavericks, but have tried all of the solutions in this thread, to no avail.

S

Hi Ralph,

When I open my Contacts app, I see that I have 4 accounts that are enabled: iCloud / my Google account / LinkedIn / Facebook

Are you saying that I should only have 1?

S

Yes.

9:25 p.m. Monday; June 15, 2015

Hi Ralph.

I have tried all of your solutions and they simply do not work. I spent two hours on the phone with a Mac Senior Advisor as well who was unable to isolate the source of the problem. He suggested the last thing we could try would be reinstalling OS X Mavericks after my Time Machine back up completes. Other than that he said we could send it to a research team for Apple to further diagnose the problem.

I went into Contacts and made sure that I'm only syncing w/ one account. It has not fixed the problem.

Hi both of you,

If you create a new Mac User account (Or already have a "test" one) can you test Messages/iMessages there with the same details ?

7:20 p.m. Tuesday; June 16, 2015

HI,

If that does not work use the green Marked Post by Linc Davis here Reset Home Folder permissions and ACLs Error to make sure all your Home folder contents have the right Permissions.

If you use the Disk Utility to Repair Permissions it only does the System ones.

You can check each and every folder within the Home Folder but this can be thousands just in the Library in some case there are Read and Write routes to the Preferences as well as the folder the preferences are in (for Sandboxing which is supposed to protect you form one app bring the whole house of cards down).

7:56 p.m. Tuesday; June 16, 2015

Hi Ralph,

I do have a second user account, and the iMessages app works fine with that account. It does not work with my primary user account. Messages come in, but they disappear as soon as I click or scroll. I just followed the instructions to reset all permissions, and that did not fix it.

S

Hi,

Hummm. Some progress.

Do this first.

Open a Finder window and go to the View Menu and select Show Path Bar.

This shows the folders and icons across the bottom of the window as to the location you are in.

Now open your User's Folder (the one with the Little House iCon)

Use the View Menu again and then the Show View Options (CMD + J)

At the bottom select the option to display the Library.

As you can see I also use Cover Flow and the various columns listed.

We have already tried removing the com.apple.iChat.plist that holds most if not all of the windowing info.

Can you go to ~/Library/Preferences and remove com.apple.imagent.plist and restart the Messages app afterwards ?

Has that helped ?

Next go to ~/Library/Caches/Messages/Pictures

This should show you all the Buddy Pic of people you have contacted on AIM, Google/Jabber, Yahoo and Bonjour.

Check that each pic displays as an icon.

This one is a long short because it harks back to issues in iChat and I have not seen it for a while.
Having said that I have this one this does not display and is zero Bytes.

Remove any pics that are like this and restart Messages again.

The Pics are refreshed from the various Servers each time you launch Messages (and any Buddy list) so they all have "today" as the date.

Any Improvement ?

You can use the icons in the path bar to go back to other folders.

Pick out the Caches folder and then find com.apple.imfoundation.IMRemoteURLConnectionAgent

Drag the contents to the Trash and restart Messages.

I have not noticed that this makes any difference to the display I see when restarting Messages.

Next do the same to the contents of com.apple.messages.TranscriptRenderingService

Restart Messages

Again for me deleting this and restarting Messages does not seem to effect the display of text in the main window and the summary that shows under the name in the left hand list.

I will wait to hear back from you with those few.

It becomes increasingly like a guessing game to work out which interferes which this function of Messages.

The Caches file for the Font Book tends not to be a single User item to discard.

8:47 p.m. Wednesday; June 17, 2015

See also All Messages Conversations Suddenly Blank or at least the reply by Amphibious on the 3rd Jan 2015.

Despite testing a manual check seemed to reveal a chat.db item was not Owned by the User.

8:53 p.m. Wednesday; June 17, 2015

Ralph,

The eagle has landed. Thanks for your persistence, and for posting a link to "All Messages Conversations Suddenly Blank.

I began following your latest round of instructions, and while doing so I noticed that in ~/Library/Messages/Archive

the archive of messages STOPPED on January 6th, 2015. That is when I noticed the problem happening.

I then started following the instructions at the "All Messages Conversations Suddenly Blank" thread, and discovered the following:

- Booted normally into my user account, I confirmed that I DID have r/w permissions AND ownership of:

chat.db

chat.db-shm

chat.db-wal

BUT -- I saw that the last date modified of chat.db was January 6th.... the same as the last message archive.

So I then booted into SAFE MODE, and discovered that in safe mode I had r/w permissions but NOT ownership of chat.db.

I then gave myself ownership of chat.db, and then booted back into normal mode.

While in normal boot mode, I notice that I still had r/w on chat.db, but now I did NOT have ownership. So I then gave myself ownership, and voila -- the problem is solved and Messages are working great now.

I don't entirely remember, but I did have a hard drive space issue a while back, so it could be a similar issue as the other user -- I ran out of hard drive space, then cleared space, and somehow lost ownership of chat.db. But what's odd is that it was only after booting into SAFE MODE and checking chat.db that I discovered this.

I hope this thread helps other users.

Best! Sean

Hi,

Thanks for coming back on this.

Glad to hear it have been sorted.

9:24 p.m. Friday; June 19, 2015

My chat.db file has read/write AND ownership permissions and I also have this problem. Help!

Hi,

Did you try the Font Book things at the top of the Thread ?

7:17 p.m. Monday; June 22, 2015

anthony.osei

try booting into safe mode and then confirming if chat.db has full r/w and ownership privileges.