Messages

Claude can search and read your iMessage and SMS conversations. Pomeroy cannot send a message, and never asks for Full Disk Access.

Messages is Pomeroy’s most sensitive app and its most carefully bounded one. Reading only, through one file you hand over yourself.

Can

• List recent conversations and who is in them
• Search the text of every message
• Read one conversation’s recent messages

Cannot

• Send a message or a reply
• Delete anything
• Ask for Full Disk Access. It never does

Tools

Tool	What it does	Kind
messages_conversations	Recent conversations, most recently active first: who is in each, how many messages it holds, when it last moved	Read
messages_search	Searches the text of every message, newest match first. Plain text, case-insensitive, no search syntax	Read
messages_read	One conversation’s recent messages, newest first, by id	Read

Try it

Find the message with the door code.
What did Sam say about Saturday?
Show me my recent conversations.
Search my messages for the tracking number.

How access works

Your messages live in one SQLite file, ~/Library/Messages/chat.db. macOS guards it behind Full Disk Access — one switch that would give Pomeroy every file on your Mac.

Pomeroy refuses that switch. Instead, switching Messages on opens a standard file dialog at ~/Library/Messages with chat.db already selected and every other file greyed out. You hand over that one file.

What Pomeroy keeps is a security-scoped bookmark, minted read-only, and every read opens the database with mode=ro. Pomeroy holds no grant over any other file on your Mac, so there is nothing else it could read even if it tried. Switch Messages off and the bookmark is all it loses.

The full reasoning

What an assistant reads becomes part of your conversation with it, the same as text you pasted in. That is true of every app, and it is worth saying plainly here: ask about the messages you would be happy to paste.

Worth knowing

A brand-new message can take a moment to appear

Pomeroy reads the database Messages writes to. A message the app has only just written may not show up in the very next call.

Undecodable messages are counted, not faked

Some messages — certain attachments and effects — cannot be turned back into text. Those come back with no text and are counted separately, never presented as a blank message.

Search has no syntax

The query is matched as plain text, case-insensitively. There are no operators to learn. The reply says how many messages matched in total, not just how many came back.

This is not Anthropic's iMessage plugin

Anthropic ships an iMessage plugin for Claude Code that needs Full Disk Access and can send replies. Pomeroy is a separate app from a different maker that only reads.