How to Delete Your iMessage History on a Mac

Removing iMessage history

Unfortunately, Messages does not work the same way as IMAP email: while the sync works fine when pushing the text and/or attachments to all of your Apple devices, it doesn’t do the same when removing them. For this it’s required to delete each thread or message manually on every device you have logged in to with your Apple ID and set up Messages on.

While this is a tedious task on an iPhone – imagine a Messages app with 400 threads to delete! – removing all chat history on a Mac can be done easily, either manually or by using a Mac cleaning app.

Removing iMessage history from a Mac manually

Keep in mind that this process will leave you with no ‘recent’ history to any iMessage conversation. Do this only if you want to get rid of all chat history for some reason.

Select the database files and move them to Trash, then empty Trash and relaunch Messages. Do the same with the contents of the two folders, but expect to see the Messages app displaying a warning explaining that it is rebuilding its database, which will take some time.

Removing messages chat history from a Mac using a third party app

Some Mac cleaning apps include features such as iMessage history removal. If you have CleanMyMac, for example, to remove your chat history simply launch the app, select Privacy > Messages > iMessage/Attachments, and click “Remove”. Keep in mind that CleanMyMac will remove the attachments, but will keep your messages in the “Archive” folder. macOS arranges chat transcripts by date in that folder, so you’ll need to locate the right date and then remove the transcript manually.

Deleting chat history on an iOS device

How to recover deleted messages

The only way to recover a deleted chat transcript is by restoring a backup that contained that conversation. But keep in mind that this action will also restore your iPhone to its previous state, so don’t expect to find any of your recent items!