Access your iMessage messages and attachments using the command line with this plugin for chronicle-etl.

# Install chronicle-etl and this plugin
$ gem install chronicle-etl
$ chronicle-etl plugins:install imessage

# Load messages from the last week
$ chronicle-etl --extractor imessage --schema chronicle --since 1w

# Of the latest 1000 messages received, who were the top senders?
$ chronicle-etl -e imessage --schema chronicle --limit 1000 --fields agent.name | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

Extractor for importing messages and attachments from local macOS iMessage install (via local cache at ~/Library/Messages/chat.db)

• input: (default: ~/Library/Messages/chat.db) Local iMessage sqlite database
• load_attachments: (default: false) Whether to load message attachments
• only_attachments: (default: false) Whether to load only messages with attachments

We want messages to have sender/receiver information set properly so we try to infer your iCloud information and phone number automatically. If these fail, you can provide the necessary information with:

• my_phone_number: Your phone number (for setting messages's actor fields properly)
• my_name: Your name (for setting messages's actor fields properly)
• icloud_account_id: Specify an email address that represents your iCloud account ID
• icloud_account_dsid: Specify iCloud DSID
  • Can find in Keychain or by running $ defaults read MobileMeAccounts Accounts