● macOS 15 or later
Mac message export with a receipt attached
Loose Ends reads every message on your Mac in one pass and exports it to PDF, CSV, TXT or HTML. Then it tells you how many messages it could not read, so you never have to take an export on faith.
Free. No account, nothing uploaded.
The part nobody else shows you
An export you cannot check is an export you have to trust.
Most messages are not stored as plain text on your Mac. They sit in a binary blob that has to be decoded, and every exporter fails on some of them. Almost none of them say so.
Loose Ends counts every row it found, every row it decoded and every row it had to skip, and writes that count into the file it hands you. If something was lost, the number is right there, and it is yours to check against Messages.
Every receipt answers three questions
- How many messages your database held
- How many of them were read
- How many could not be, and why
The receipt is on screen after every read, and it is written into every file you export, so whoever opens that file years from now can tell what it skipped.
01 / Today
The questions you never answered
Every conversation leaves something open. Loose Ends reads the whole archive and collects four kinds: a question nobody answered, a promise you made, a promise made to you, and a plan that never got a date. Each one carries the sentence it came from, so you can see why it was flagged. Mark it done, snooze it, dismiss it, or open a reply in Messages with nothing typed for you.
Filter by whose move it is. Sweep the old ones in one pass.
02 Export
PDF for reading, CSV for working
Export the entire archive, one person, one conversation, a date range, or just the results of a search. PDF, CSV, TXT or HTML. The completeness receipt travels inside the file, so whoever opens it later can tell exactly what was skipped.
366,600 messages read in 5.1 seconds, measured.
03 Search
Finds the words you did not use
Full text search across every message and every year, fast enough to type into. Turn on related words and a search for dinner also finds brunch, lunch and supper. Turn on phrasings and it adds the way people actually write it: grab a bite, get food. Export the results with their own receipt.
Measured at 63 to 79 percent more matches on the same query.
04 Reconnect
The people who went quiet
Not everyone you have not texted lately matters. Reconnect ranks the people you had a real back and forth with, over years, who have now gone months without a word, and shows the last thing either of you said. Nothing here is a model's opinion. It is arithmetic on your own history.
05 Ask
Ask in your own words
Type a question the way you would say it. Who do I text the most. How many messages did I send in 2024. Loose Ends answers from tools that run over your archive, prints the rows it worked from, and names the lookups it ran. It never writes a sentence your own messages cannot back.
Requires macOS 26.
06 Wrapped
A year of messages, read in a minute
How many messages, who you talked to, the hours you write in, the longest run of days you never missed, and the people you have not heard from since. One year at a time, counted rather than guessed, and it works offline like everything else here.
Also in the app
The rest of what a message archive is good for
A page for every person
First message and last, how many each way, who tends to start, and how long each of you takes to reply.
Group threads in place
The rooms you share with someone open right on their page, a name over every bubble, one click back.
One folder, not the whole disk
Loose Ends asks for your Messages folder, not Full Disk Access, and you can revoke it whenever you like.
Nothing is invented
Where the on-device model writes, it may only quote your archive, and the quote is checked against the real message before you ever see it.
Privacy
Your messages stay on this Mac
This app reads years of private conversation. That is exactly why none of it goes anywhere.
- Nothing from your messages is ever sent. Not the text, not names, not phone numbers, not addresses, not attachments, not even the dates of your conversations.
- No account and no sign in. There is no server to hold anything, so there is nothing to leak, sell or subpoena.
- One folder grant, revocable. You point Loose Ends at your Messages folder once. It never asks for Full Disk Access, and macOS lets you take the grant back.
If the app hits an error or crashes, it reports the error itself along with an anonymous install identifier, so it can be fixed. Every field in that report is filtered before it is sent, and nothing from your archive is in it.
Every message you have sent is already on this Mac.
Read it, search it, export it, and check the export.
Free. macOS 15 or later.