@jkister 6 February 2020 edited more from that month

Mass delete texts from iMessage on MacOS Mojavae I received over 1,000 text messages from random four-digit numbers like 2367, 3632, and 2346. I didn't want any of them. it just took some Perl. i used a simple SQL LIKE of four underscores to match any sender that had four characters. #!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use DBI; my $SQL_PATTERN = '____'; my $dsn = "DBI:SQLite:dbname=$ENV{HOME}/Library/Messages/chat.db"; my $dbh = DBI->connect( $dsn, undef, undef ); my $sql = <<__EOS__ SELECT message.rowid AS mid, chat.rowid AS cid, text FROM message, chat, chat_message_join WHERE mid = chat_message_join.message_id AND cid = chat_message_join.chat_id AND chat.chat_identifier LIKE \'$SQL_PATTERN\' __EOS__ ; my $sth = $dbh->prepare($sql); $sth->execute; while( my $row = $sth->fetchrow_hashref){ #print "$row->{mid} <-> $row->{cid}\n"; #print "message found: $row->{text}\n"; $dbh->do( "DELETE FROM message WHERE message.ROWID = $row->{mid}" ); $dbh->do( "DELETE FROM chat WHERE chat.ROWID = $row->{cid}" ); $dbh->do( "DELETE FROM chat_message_join WHERE chat_id = $row->{cid} AND message_id = $row->{mid}" ); } Then I had to restart some process, or maybe reboot, i forget. but it worked. you could also modify the sql to delete texts that contain some string: #!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use DBI; my $SQL_PATTERN = '%free vacation%'; my $dsn = "DBI:SQLite:dbname=$ENV{HOME}/Library/Messages/chat.db"; my $dbh = DBI->connect( $dsn, undef, undef ); my $sql = <<__EOS__ SELECT message.rowid AS mid, chat.rowid AS cid, text FROM message, chat, chat_message_join WHERE mid = chat_message_join.message_id AND cid = chat_message_join.chat_id AND text LIKE \'$SQL_PATTERN\' __EOS__ ; my $sth = $dbh->prepare($sql); $sth->execute; while( my $row = $sth->fetchrow_hashref){ #print "$row->{mid} <-> $row->{cid}\n"; #print "message found: $row->{text}\n"; $dbh->do( "DELETE FROM message WHERE message.ROWID = $row->{mid}" ); $dbh->do( "DELETE FROM chat WHERE chat.ROWID = $row->{cid}" ); $dbh->do( "DELETE FROM chat_message_join WHERE chat_id = $row->{cid} AND message_id = $row->{mid}" ); } In this case, all messages containing the phrase "free vacation" would be deleted. find how to install perl from Google. Maybe perlbrew.