imsg

What This Skill Does

The imsg skill provides a powerful command-line interface for interacting with the macOS Messages.app. By leveraging this tool, an AI agent can read, monitor, and send iMessages or SMS text messages directly from your terminal. It bridges the gap between your local messaging environment and your automated workflows, allowing you to manage conversations, fetch message history, and trigger outbound messages based on system events or AI analysis.

Installation

To integrate this skill into your environment, use the OpenClaw installer: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/steipete/imsg

Ensure that you have granted 'Full Disk Access' to your terminal application in macOS System Settings under Privacy & Security, as this is required to access the underlying SQLite message database. Additionally, when sending messages for the first time, you must authorize Automation permissions to allow the script to control the Messages.app.

Use Cases

• Automated Notifications: Trigger alerts or status updates from your scripts to your phone via iMessage.
• Contextual Context Fetching: Let your AI agent read recent messages in a specific thread to provide relevant responses or summarize recent discussions.
• Message Monitoring: Use the watch functionality to trigger actions when a specific contact messages you with a keyword.
• File Sharing: Automatically send generated reports or screenshots to team members or family.

Example Prompts

1. "Check my recent messages in the 'Work' chat and summarize the last five items."
2. "Send an iMessage to +14155551212 saying 'The deployment is complete' and include the file at /tmp/build_summary.pdf."
3. "Watch for any incoming messages from my manager in the 'Management' chat and let me know immediately when a new one arrives."

Tips & Limitations

• Service Selection: Always use the --service flag if you want to force iMessage or SMS delivery, otherwise, the agent will default to 'auto'.
• Privacy: The skill accesses your private message database. Be mindful of which agents have access to this skill.
• Safety: Always review the recipient and content before confirming a 'send' command to avoid accidental messages. The skill does not support group chat management natively; targeting specific chat IDs is the most reliable method. Ensure the recipient is registered with iMessage if you are forcing the iMessage service, or the delivery may fail silently.