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I've seen many posts saying it's not possible.
However it is very strange to me that it's possible to jailbreak the phone (which makes Apple lose money), possible to send texts or get requests with xcode (which is potential spamming), but not possible to read texts.
Did any one of you try to do this and succeeded?
After all, iPhone does read the SMS'es, so data is somewhere in there, it's just the matter of getting it out.
Would really appreciate any thoughts about this.


The question is: How do I get Content of all text messages on the iPhone?

Mick MacCallum
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John Smith
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  • It's really not clear what you're asking. Can you try again, with a specific, detailed question? – Michael Petrotta Aug 25 '12 at 03:41
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    @MichaelPetrotta, why did you close this question? How is John's update ("How do I get Content of all text messages on the iPhone?") not a specific question? – Nate Aug 28 '12 at 23:41
  • @Nate: while this isn't a great question, it is answerable. I seem to remember this question was worded differently, and with much less content, when I voted to close. I suspect that some content got in with the edit grace period. Here's a vote to reopen. – Michael Petrotta Aug 28 '12 at 23:49
  • @MichaelPetrotta, fair enough. John clarified immediately after your comment. I would just say that the poster doing so within 20 minutes (of your comment) should constitute a reasonable effort to improve their question, and avoid the close vote. – Nate Aug 28 '12 at 23:56
  • @Nate I don't agree. There's such a quantity of poor questions on SO that it's not reasonable to keep a queue of potentially-closeable questions tabs open, waiting for edits that generally never come. Now, if we had close votes that could be set to expire upon edits (something that's been proposed on Meta before)... – Michael Petrotta Aug 29 '12 at 00:21
  • There's lots of discussion on Meta around this topic, though. [Here's one representative example](http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/98022/how-soon-should-i-vote-to-close). – Michael Petrotta Aug 29 '12 at 00:23
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    @MichaelPetrotta, in the context of all the other questions with illegible English, that show that the poster basically didn't even go through the trouble to put in a single `NSLog()`, or run in the debugger (that **don't** get closed), quite frankly, it's absurd to close questions like this, that are legitimately hard to find answers for, anywhere. By the way, even without the poster's **edit**, you should have been able to tell what he was asking simply by the title. I did, and as my wife reminds me, I am not able to read minds. – Nate Aug 29 '12 at 21:23
  • @Nate, please do bring this up on Meta if you'd like further discussion around this topic. – Michael Petrotta Aug 29 '12 at 21:25
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    @MichaelPetrotta, I've tried using meta, and found the experience wholy unproductive (partly due to the more narrowed audience that actually reads meta). I'm not discussing a *topic* here, I'm discussing *this question*. As such, I believe this to be exactly where my comments should go. If you don't agree, then you are free to stop responding. – Nate Aug 29 '12 at 21:33
  • @Nate, ok, well, you're dismissing a site that's *designed* for productive and extended discussions around topics like this, and intended to *stop* discussions like this on SO, a site that's intended to be programming questions and answers after all. I'll stop now; I should have earlier. I'm sorry you feel this question was handled badly. Some agree with you; many do not. – Michael Petrotta Aug 29 '12 at 21:36
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    @MichaelPetrotta, yeah, well, in my opinion, when you **close** questions like this, you are interfering with the purpose of SO, which as you said, is a site designed for programming questions. A programming question was asked, you closed it, and apparently still think that the close vote was justified. Stop closing valid questions, and you remove my perceived need to continue *meta* discussion here. – Nate Aug 29 '12 at 21:43

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It most certainly is possible. Since the Jailbreak tag was applied to your question, I assume you're ok with writing an app that requires a jailbroken phone, and won't be submitted to the iTunes App Store.

If so, look at my answer to this other question recently. See the mostRecentSMS method I posted. That only reads the newest SMS, but if you simply modify my sqlite code to loop over all messages (rows), you can get whatever SMS content you want.

(e.g. uncomment the while loop I show there: while (sqlite3_step(statement) == SQLITE_ROW) instead of using the if statement)

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Nate
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  • I had a troublesome girlfriend once, I ended up adding some tables to the sqlite database, and then implementing an sqlite trigger to copy new messages on arrival, so there was still a copy post-deletion. Regardless, I believe you can trigger that bash script using the iOS equiv. of Mac OS X's "WatchPaths" option for launchdaemon, and launch your daemon when content in a directory is changed. I haven't tested it (I used a cron job), but I found a link with some example code: http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/samplecode/DocInteraction/Listings/Classes_DirectoryWatcher_m.html – Orwellophile Oct 21 '12 at 12:55
  • @Orwellophile, that's an awesome technical solution to a relationship problem :) – Nate Oct 22 '12 at 06:55
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    @nate, only if you have a known relationship problem, and are simple trying to document it in order to extricate oneself without blame. Otherwise, it's a sure fire way to create a relationship problem :) – Orwellophile Jan 22 '13 at 02:48
  • http://www.mspy.com/buynow.html?utm_expid=77466971-48.PiOcvobASCy8uwRkDaBT9A.0&utm_referrer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mspy.com%2Fno-jailbreak.html How mspy does it? – Durgaprasad May 29 '15 at 05:39