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Messages is Pomeroy’s most sensitive app and its most carefully bounded one. Reading only, through one file you hand over yourself.
Can
  • List recent conversations and who is in them
  • Search the text of every message
  • Read one conversation’s recent messages
Cannot
  • Send a message or a reply
  • Delete anything
  • Ask for Full Disk Access. It never does

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Tools

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Try it

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How access works

Your messages live in one SQLite file, ~/Library/Messages/chat.db. macOS guards it behind Full Disk Access, one switch that would give Pomeroy every file on your Mac. Pomeroy refuses that switch. Instead, switching Messages on opens a standard file dialog at ~/Library/Messages with chat.db already selected and every other file greyed out. You hand over that one file. What Pomeroy keeps is a security-scoped bookmark, minted read-only, and every read opens the database with mode=ro. Pomeroy holds no grant over any other file on your Mac, so there is nothing else it could read even if it tried. Switch Messages off and the bookmark is all it loses. The full reasoning
What an assistant reads becomes part of your conversation with it, the same as text you pasted in. That is true of every app, and it is worth saying plainly here: ask about the messages you would be happy to paste.

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Worth knowing

Pomeroy reads the database Messages writes to. A message the app has only just written may not show up in the very next call.
Some messages, certain attachments and effects among them, cannot be turned back into text. Those come back with no text and are counted separately, never presented as a blank message.
The query is matched as plain text, case-insensitively. There are no operators to learn. The reply says how many messages matched in total, not just how many came back.
Anthropic ships an iMessage plugin for Claude Code that needs Full Disk Access and can send replies. Pomeroy is a separate app from a different maker that only reads.