It would be great if Devonthink could capture and search all text messages from Apple Messages on Mac OS as structured documents (From, To, Date, …), and from Messages on iOS as well. (Mac OS and iOS Messages aren’t kept in sync, and Mac OS Messages misses many iOS messages.)
There’s no API for that. As has been discussed here some days ago. Using the forum search should tell you all you need to know.
See on another recent post where I provided a little Python program to export messages to txt files that can be easily imported or indexed into DEVONthink. Another person confirmed it works. Yea. You can modify the code to produce the structure you want, if that important.
The days when this was simple are long gone. Apple – for some good reasons, some perhaps not – moved away from file-based data stores for Messages. Now they’re stored in SQL structures, which is accessible, but not in a trivial way.
Note the other responses here.
That script worked well and accomplished the task for the Message App.
Still waiting for some bright mind to find a way to do the same for WhatsApp but it seems to be encrypted Signal App works already in a kinda techy way though.
maybe this does the trick. I have resisted using Whatsapp so cannot try.
https://faq.whatsapp.com/1180414079177245/?cms_platform=android
Yes, this works but it somewhat manual considering I’ve collected a few hundred chats over the years.
I’ll give it a bit more thought but will eventually have to prioritize if this is the only feasible way. Exporting iOS Backups and scraping those would also work (acc. to Google) but feels rather manual as well.
At this point, unless something does indeed exist, or someone figures out how to get at the WhatsApp items and turn them into text, RTF, or something “standard”, … above is what we have.
Why all the “cool kids” have abandoned Email which has this feature of “export” and then wanting the new stuff to instantly have all these features that were thrown away by moving with the crowd … beyond me.
Not that I consider my kids “cool”–maybe they are, but they all avoid and complain when I don’t use text msgs with them and rely on email, or heavens, a phone call.