Q: imessage not showing old messages on Macbook Pro

HI,

You should be looking in ~/Library/Messages

This is the Library in your Home Holder  (The Little House Icon one) - but it has been hidden since Lion.

In a Finder window hold the ALT key down and then use the Go Menu - the Library will now show in the list.

Select it and then navigate to Messages

The three chat.db items in here hold the history to the iMessages conversations.

Saved Chats if you were making them are stored in ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.iChat/Data/Library/Messages/Archive

Back when the Messages beta came out it stored the Saved Chats in a different place but it could also read the iChat storage place that was ~/Documents/iChats.

Now that Yosemite is here the places have changed and become deeper in the Home folder and it does not seem able to read older chats or show them as "history" the  way earlier versions did.

The Chat.db items also seems to be limited to go back to the Upgrade day only.

I am unable at this time to say if this is the way Yosemite works or the way I upgraded to Yosemite (I fear the later)

9:38 pm      Sunday; April 26, 2015

Hi,

Spotlight  does not search some folders and ~/Library is one of them (This is now a bit generalized as it does tend to find Saved Chats which are buried much deeper)

You can delete the Chat.db items  and you will lose the "History" to Active chats that might still show in the main Messages window.

I have not tried deleting it - so you might find it also clears the active chats of the iMessages as well.

This is my Messages Folder (see the Path Bar displayed across the bottom).

If it were removed AND you had lost permissions to Write to the Folder  then it would not be recreated.

As I Save chats I and not sure if the chat.db is searchable in the sense that Spotlight might be able to read it  like it can the Saved chats.

Saved Chats are all chats, iMessages, AIM, Jabber as well as Bonjour and Yahoo chats if you have set up these accounts.

10:00 pm      Sunday; April 26, 2015

Hi,

IF it is only iMessages items that you are looking for and the chat.db items seems to go back to when you set up the computer I am not sure what to suggest.

The Chat.db items can be opened in TextEdit but they are not that readable and it would take a long time to find the oldest chats.

Even then I can see it might not explain why only some of them display.

9:38 pm      Monday; April 27, 2015

Hi,

The Chat.db items and the Archive folder's contents only display "history" to chat that are currently going on.

It seems the app keeps a list of Open chats somewhere (I have not found out where) along with a record of the displayed text (which I also have not found).

If you chat to these same people is anything showing up then ?

9:58 pm      Monday; April 27, 2015

Hi,

I have looked at the contents of .plists in ~/Library/Preferences and ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.soagent/Data/Library/Preferences that relate to the Messages app and cannot find anything that seems to point to the List of chats and their contents.

This includes the MessageHelper items in the SOAgent folder as well as iChat and Messages items in the regular Preferences folder.

I don't have anything else to add at this time.

8:46 pm      Tuesday; April 28, 2015

Same problem here, since 10.10.3 Messages can't display chat history, no longer scrolling back in messages history with the contacts.

Very annoying

Hi! I got such amnesia. Messages continue to be archived in the Archive folder, but the messages and threads of old messages are not loaded in Messages. so I can not access to them from the Messages app. I tried this:  https://gist.github.com/nschum/1cf00aee2f1ac8869df4

But the terminal told the version of OSX is not the expected one, so I could not merge these databases. Maybe somebody will know how to modify this script for it to work with 10.10.3?

I don't know what to do for Messages to work properly.
Desperate.

Hi,

I would guess (and it is only a guess) that the following needs to reflect the current Darwin version

if os.popen("uname -sr").read() != "Darwin 14.0.0\n":

    print("This is not for your OS X version")

    sys.exit(1)

This may or may not have changed at OS X updates  (I would have thought it was more likely at named Upgrades rather than updates though).

Using System Info rather than About this Mac will tell you the version (See Software)

8:06 pm      Monday; May 11, 2015

My Version is Darwin 14.3.0.

Is it such big change for this script to be run without any issue?