How to find the first message in an iMessage conversation, 3 ways.

Quick answer

Messages has no button to jump to the top. Open the conversation on your Mac and keep scrolling up, pausing while it loads older messages, until nothing more appears. First make sure Messages > Settings > General > Keep messages is set to Forever and Messages in iCloud has finished syncing, or the oldest texts may not be on your Mac.

1. Scroll to the top in Messages

1. In Messages > Settings, check that General > Keep messages is set to Forever and that iMessage > Enable Messages in iCloud is on. If you just switched it on, give the Mac time to download your history.
2. Click the conversation in the sidebar.
3. Scroll up with your trackpad or mouse. Messages loads older texts in batches, so you'll see it pause each time it fetches more.
4. Keep scrolling until no older messages load. The message at the top is the oldest one on this Mac.

Where it falls short

• It takes a long time. A conversation with years of daily texts can mean many minutes of scrolling.
• It is easy to lose your place. Click anything, or switch conversations, and you start again from the bottom.
• The top may not be the real first text. If you texted on an old phone before using Messages in iCloud, or deleted chats along the way, those messages aren't on your Mac.

2. Find when every chat started, in Terminal

Messages keeps a date for every message in its database. One query in Terminal lists every conversation with the date of its first message, oldest first, which is a fun list on its own.

1. Open System Settings > Privacy & Security > Full Disk Access and switch on Terminal.
2. In Terminal, paste this to work on a copy of the database:

mkdir -p ~/Desktop/messages-copy && cp ~/Library/Messages/chat.db* ~/Desktop/messages-copy/

3. Paste this and press Return:

sqlite3 ~/Desktop/messages-copy/chat.db "SELECT datetime(MIN(m.date)/1000000000 + 978307200, 'unixepoch', 'localtime') AS first, c.chat_identifier, c.display_name FROM message m JOIN chat_message_join cm ON cm.message_id = m.ROWID JOIN chat c ON c.ROWID = cm.chat_id GROUP BY c.ROWID ORDER BY first;"

4. Each line shows the date and time of the first message, the phone number, email or group ID, and the group's name if it has one. Delete the copy on your desktop when you're done.

Now you know which year to look for. Search Messages for a word from that time, or use a date search to get there.

3. Jump to any date with Textlore

Textlore is a Mac app that reads your whole Messages history at once, so you can jump straight to a date instead of scrolling for minutes. It only reads: it never sends, edits or deletes a message, and nothing leaves your Mac.

1. Install it. Download Textlore, open it and switch on Full Disk Access when it asks. macOS keeps your Messages history in a protected folder, and this lets Textlore read it. About 100,000 messages import in under a minute.
2. Open the conversation. Press ⌘1 for Conversations and pick the person or group.
3. Jump to a date. Press ⌘J and pick an early date, such as the month you met, to go straight there. Scroll up from there to the very first message.
4. Or search. Type in:Jordan before:2016 to see only the oldest messages in that chat, and press Return on one to open the conversation there.

Your Lore, at ⌘4, shows your texting life as tree rings, one ring for every year, so you can see the year your history starts. Click a ring or a year to see just that year.

Textlore keeps its own copy of every message from the day you install it, so that first text stays even if Messages deletes the chat later.

See the first text in any conversation in seconds. Every feature is free for 14 days. No account, no email, no card.

Download free14 days, no account Buy Textlore, $39 $20Buy Textlore, $39Launch price until 28 OctoberOnce, for 2 Macs