Open Messages right now and try to find that discount code someone sent you last month. Go on, search for it, and unless you remember the exact word they typed, you’re stuck scrolling for ten minutes. This Redditor, u/Professional-Rest138, found a workaround, and running it turned up two codes and a booking reference they’d completely forgotten existed.
The setup uses ChatGPT’s desktop app connected straight to your Messages history. It searches by meaning instead of exact words. You can describe something badly, the way you’d describe it to a friend, and it still finds it. That’s the whole trick, and it’s the difference between Apple’s search and this one.
Everything anyone has ever texted you is already sitting on your Mac. The problem was never that the information disappeared, it’s that you had no way to ask a question and get a real answer back. Now you do.
🛠️ How To Set It Up
- You need a Mac with Apple silicon. No iPhone version exists yet, and this won’t work in a browser.
- Open the ChatGPT desktop app (free plan works fine).
- Go to the sidebar, find Plugins, and search for Messages.
- Enable it. macOS will ask for Full Disk Access, approve it.
- Once connected, ChatGPT can read through your message history and pull answers from it.
That’s it. No export, no third-party app scanning your phone.
📋 Three Prompts Worth Stealing
First, the sweep. Run this to catch every code and confirmation number hiding in your history:
Find every discount code, booking reference, confirmation number and tracking link anyone has ever texted me. List them with the company, the code, and the date I got it. Flag anything that looks like it has expired.
The original poster says the one they actually use most is the vague one, for when you remember that something exists but not who sent it:
Somebody texted me an address for a place we were meeting, I think in the last two months, but I cannot remember who. Find it and tell me who sent it and when.
And then there’s the one that stings a little:
Go through my messages and find every conversation where the other person sent the last message and I never replied. List them oldest first, with who it was, how long ago, and one line on what they said. Do not reply to any of them yet.
What’s actually happening here is semantic search doing the job your brain can’t. Normal search matches letters. This matches intent, so “the code for the shoes” finds a message that never used the word “code” at all.
🔍 What The Results Actually Mean
If the first prompt turns up a dozen codes, most of them are probably dead. That’s normal, discount codes have short shelf lives and nobody deletes the text after using them. The value is in the two or three that are still live and that you’d never have found otherwise.
The vague-memory prompt works because you’re not fighting your own recall. You don’t need the sender’s name or the date, just a rough shape of the memory, and the model fills in the rest. That’s the actual upgrade over Spotlight search.
The unanswered-messages list is less about productivity and more about a gut check. Seeing it sorted oldest first, with how long ago and what the person actually said, changes something. It tends to be the part that makes people actually go reply, instead of letting it sit for another six months.
Worth noting none of these prompts require you to know anything technical going in. You’re not writing a query language or picking search operators. You’re just describing what you’re looking for the same way you’d text a friend: “hey do you remember who sent me that address.” The model does the translation work.
💡 Extra Tips
Add “do not reply to anything, just show me” to the end of any of these prompts. It costs nothing and it means a misread instruction can’t accidentally turn into a message you never meant to send.
If you’re the type who forgets tracking links exist until the package is already back at the depot, run the first prompt weekly. Takes ten seconds and your future self stops missing packages.
One commenter asked if this works on deleted texts. It doesn’t. ChatGPT can only see what’s still sitting in your Messages database. Treat that as a reason to stop deleting confirmation texts the second you read them.
The original poster mentioned keeping a running doc of a hundred prompts like these, each tied to a real use case. That habit alone is worth copying, even if you never touch the Messages integration. Half the value of a good prompt is remembering it exists three months later when you actually need it.
🚀 Give It A Shot
If you’re on a Mac with Apple silicon, this takes five minutes to set up. It pays for itself the first time it finds a code you’d forgotten about. Run the vague-memory prompt on the first thing that comes to mind and see what it digs up.
searched my whole text history for every code, booking reference and tracking link anyone has ever sent me. found two i’d completely forgotten about
by u/Professional-Rest138 in ChatGPTPromptGenius