How to Auto-Log Every iMessage to Your CRM in 5 Minutes

Quick answer. Vellaci's macOS sidecar reads your Messages database locally (read-only), maps senders to your contacts, and logs metadata to your personal CRM. Setup: 5 minutes. No cloud middleman for chat content. The full how-to lives on /integrations/imessage; this post is the blog-feed mirror.

Why iMessage matters

For founders, families and 30-something professionals, iMessage is where the real relationships live — closer family, real friends, the people you actually message. Email is for work. LinkedIn is for performance. iMessage is the chat surface most personal CRMs ignore.

Of the major personal CRMs in 2026, only Vellaci auto-logs iMessage. Cloze has partial iOS-only support. Dex, Monica, Clay, Notion don't touch it.

What you need

• macOS Ventura or later.
• Admin access to grant Full Disk Access.
• A Vellaci account (free trial is fine).

Step 1 — Install the Vellaci sidecar

From your Vellaci dashboard → Integrations → iMessage → download the .dmg. Drag the sidecar into Applications. The app is signed and notarised.

Step 2 — Grant Full Disk Access (and why)

macOS protects the Messages database. Vellaci can't read it without your explicit permission.

1. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access.
2. Toggle Vellaci on.
3. macOS will prompt you to restart the sidecar.

What this grants: read-only access to ~/Library/Messages/chat.db. The sidecar never writes to your Messages database, and it never reads any other file outside that path.

Step 3 — Sign in

Open the sidecar. Click Connect to my Vellaci. A browser opens to the Clerk auth flow. 30 seconds.

Step 4 — Map iMessage handles to contacts

The first sync scans your chat.db and lists every unknown handle (phone number, email address). Vellaci auto-matches handles already in your address book. For the rest, drag each handle onto the right contact in the dashboard.

Tip: do the top 30 first. The long tail can wait.

Step 5 — Choose what to log

Default: metadata only. That means sender, recipient, timestamp, conversation ID, direction — never the message body.

Optional: enable log body for specific contacts. This is off by default for privacy. Some users enable it only for close family (where they want full timeline context).

Step 6 — Verify a test message

Send yourself a message from another device (iPhone or iPad). Open the Vellaci dashboard within 30 seconds. The new log should appear on your own contact card.

Privacy: what stays local, what goes to the cloud

Data	Stays on Mac	Syncs to Vellaci cloud
Message body	✅ (default)	Only if you opt in per-contact
Sender / recipient handles	❌	✅
Timestamp	❌	✅
Conversation ID	❌	✅
Direction (sent/received)	❌	✅
Attachments	✅	❌

iCloud is never touched. Apple's E2E encryption on Messages remains intact — the sidecar reads only the local SQLite database.

Troubleshooting

"Vellaci isn't seeing any messages." → Quit the sidecar entirely, re-grant Full Disk Access, restart. macOS sometimes caches the permission state incorrectly after the first toggle.

"Handles aren't matching to contacts." → Make sure the iMessage handle (phone number with country code, e.g., +41 79 123 4567) matches the contact's phone number format in Vellaci. The mapping is exact-match, not fuzzy.

"Group chats look weird." → Group chats show all participants on each member's timeline by default. Toggle "Exclude groups" in settings if you only want 1:1 conversations.

"Attachments don't appear." → Vellaci doesn't sync attachments by design (privacy + storage). Message bodies that reference an attachment will note [attachment] if you've opted into body logging.

How this compares to Dex, Monica, Clay, Cloze

Tool	iMessage capture
Vellaci	Full (macOS local sidecar)
Cloze	Partial (iOS only)
Dex	None
Monica	None
Clay	None
Notion CRM	None

This is one of the clearest differentiators in the personal CRM category in 2026. Most tools were architected before founders started messaging investors on iMessage. Vellaci was architected after.

Related

• iMessage integration page — the canonical version with HowTo schema.
• The complete personal CRM guide — pillar.
• Vellaci vs Cloze — the only other tool with any iMessage story.
• Personal CRM for founders — workflow page that leans on this.