Message Crate

Your chat history, on a server you run yourself.

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Table of Contents

1. About The Project
2. Who The Project Is For
3. Getting Started
4. Contributing
5. Additional documentation
6. License
7. Project Status
8. Maintainers
9. Related Projects

About The Project

Message Crate copies your conversations out of chat apps and phone backups — iMessage, WhatsApp, Android SMS — and stores them in a self-hosted, searchable archive that you control. Read old threads in a browser, search years of messages, and export them as ordinary files whenever you like.

Project Details

The Message Crate software has three parts:

• Backend - The core system that runs on your computer. It keeps you logged in, stores your messages, and powers the search feature.
• Desktop App - A program that imports your messages into Message Crate from phone backups and app exports. You can also view, organize, and export your messages from here.
• Website - The desktop app in a web browser, for reading, searching, and organizing your messages. Importing, exporting, and converting need the desktop app.

You can bring in:

• Apple Messages from an iPhone backup, or from Messages on a Mac
• Android texts and picture messages from an SMS Backup & Restore file
• WhatsApp from an iPhone backup or from WhatsApp's Android files

A few older export formats still work if that is all you have left.

Once messages are imported you can:

• Read threads the way you would in an app or on a phone, including group chats. Photos, videos, and other attachments are included.
• Search across years of conversations
• Save a copy back out as ordinary files if you want a directory on disk
• Combine texts from more than one phone or app into one archive

Who The Project Is For

This project is for people who want a personal copy of their phone messages. That includes anyone replacing a phone, leaving a chat app, or keeping a long-term archive of texts.

Getting Started

Follow the User Guide to run the demo and import your own data.

The Developer Guide covers setting up a local development environment and compiling from source.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. The Contributing guide covers the development environment, running the code, and how pull requests work.

Additional documentation

Most documentation lives in the guidebook at messagecrate.app:

• User Guide
• Developer Guide — including Architecture (System Design, Message Transfer, Common message)

License

Message Crate is source-available, not open source. It is distributed under the Fair Core License 1.0 (FCL-1.0-ALv2): you can read the code, change it, build it, and run it for yourself, but you may not offer it as a product that competes with Message Crate. Two years after each version is released, that version becomes available under the Apache License 2.0.

See LICENSE.md for the full terms.

Project Status

This project is currently under heavy development and moving towards a v1.0.0 release.

Maintainers

Matt Beisser - hello@bitrealm.io

Related Projects

• ChatLab - Local-first tool that analyzes chat history with AI.
• Discord Export - Hosted helpers for pulling Discord data, including a server member list.
• DiscordChatExporter - Exports Discord channel history to HTML, JSON, CSV, and other files.
• iMazing - Manages iOS devices and can export message threads from an iPhone or iTunes backup.
• imessage-exporter - Command-line tool that exports Apple Messages from chat.db to several text formats.
• msgvault - Offline archive for email and chat with search and analytics on SQLite and DuckDB.
• OMA WAP Forum - Specifications for WAP and MMS that some Android SMS apps still encode.
• OpenExtract - Pulls iMessage, SMS, photos, and voicemail out of a local iPhone backup.
• SMS Backup & Restore - Android app from SyncTech that writes SMS and MMS to an XML file.
• SMS Backup+ - Android app that backs SMS and MMS up to an IMAP mailbox (often Gmail).

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