MacOS – Weird iMessage behavior on Yosemite

macosmessages

Something weird is happening with iMessage on my Mac. I can send and receive messages fine but when I close iMessage and reopen it, all my messages disappear. Also, if the app is closed and I get a message, I get a notification but when I open the app it's not there.

The conversations are all there but they are empty.

What I've tried so far:

  1. Signed out of my account, closed iMessage and restarted the computer.
  2. Deleted all plists related to iMessage in ~/Library/Preferences
  3. Delete ~/Library/IdentityServices

What else should I try?

Best Answer

First make sure the "Save history when conversations are closed" is checked in "Preferences-->General" to have an archive of conversations in the future.

Second the Messages.app history and archives are saved to a couple locations in Yosemite.

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.iChat/Data/Library/Messages/
~/Library/Messages/

Backup the files in the folder ~/Library/Messages/ and save to a separate location to have a backup of your previous messages.(if they exist)

Then remove both the files in above paths:

rm -rf ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.iChat/Data/Library/Messages/*
rm -rf ~/Library/Messages

Restart Messages.app and the below message will appear that it is rebuilding your Messages database. The couple times a have done this it resulted in having to just restart the machine as I didn't want to wait.

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Just remember to make a backup of any files you delete as they hold archives of previous conversations.

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