Reading SMS from the iPhone on your computer

I want to read all the saved SMS on my iPhone on my computer. The reasons are archiving, encryption (delete them afterwards on your phone), analysis, and so on. There are no high accessability-requirements, standard knowledge of SQL are enough.

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2 answers

Synchronize SMS from iPhone

With some third party sync tools you can synchronize SMS (and more) with your Computer.

Some examples for Mac OS are:
* MobileSyncBrowser: http://homepage.mac.com/vaughn/msync/
* The Missing Sync for iPhone: http://www.markspace.com/products/iphone/missing-sync-iphone-mac.html

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Getting the SMS.db from your iPhone

The first requirement is that you have a jailbroken iPhone.
Through the app Cydia one has to download the app OpenSSH.
After downloading the required software you have to establish a connection between your computer and your iPhone so you can open the ssh connection.
In this solution both are members of a secure WLAN. (iPhone IP in this example: 192.168.1.2)
The standard login credentials for the ssh-access are usename 'root' and password 'alpine'.
The SMS archive is stored as '/var/root/Library/SMS/sms.db'.
If you just want to copy the database you can use this one-liner:
>scp root@192.168.1.2:/var/root/Library/SMS/sms.db /home/user/
After entering the password the transfer should start.
If you want to browse the filesystem you can do this by connecting with ssh:
>ssh root@192.168.1.2
After entering the password you should be able to access the filesystem.

If you have an application to view sqlite3 databases you can start browsing the archive.
Example:
>sqlite3 SMS.db
>.tables (shows the tables in the database)
>.schema message (shows the schema with all the triggers of the table message)
>SELECT * FROM message ORDER BY `date` DESC; (lists all saved messages ordered by the date in descending order)

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