Saving exported chats with contact name instead of phone number

[pperepa]

Hello and huge thanks to @ReagentX for creating this amazing tool.

Just curious if it would be possible to create an option to save the exported chats with the contact name instead of the phone number? I'm able to see the saved contact's name once I open the HTML file, but can't identify the conversation when sifting through the directory's files. (Example: save as "BobBuilder.html" instead of "8794356609.html"). Please let me know if this is possible already and I'm just missing it somehow.

I did read through the reasoning in #64 for the requirement of unique handles in the output file naming, but I wonder if there is a way to handle this case differently? I imagine there may not be too many cases where two contacts have the same exact full name.

Thank you again!

[ReagentX]

There’s no built-in option to export using contact names as the primary filename; this is intentional for several technical reasons tied to ensuring the exporter remains reliable and avoids potential data issues.

Contact names aren’t guaranteed to be unique in your address book or across exports. Even if rare, assuming uniqueness could break exports unpredictably for some users, and we’d rather err on the side of caution.

Using inherently unique identifiers from iMessage’s database guarantees no collisions without extra logic. The exporter guarantees a 1:1 mapping between a conversation and a file. Once we allow non-unique identifiers at the filesystem level, we risk collisions and silent overwrites.

[pperepa]

That makes sense, thank you for providing that context.

[sword4nsics-EOF]

I wanted the export to show in a chat with a specific phone number from an iMessage to another iPhone user with iMessage turned off but had RCS enabled and read receipts turned off, the date/time header of every chat (RCS protocol still communicates read receipts), there was a parathesis saying xxPERSONxx read your message xxTIMExx after you sent it). I wanted the PERSON to show the contact name from the device. I went in and changed the code on my system myself to make it happen, but is that something you could consider updating? the phone number still shows as the communication but the read receipts could say more than the generic "they" as an option to use the devices contact name for that person. This way it is an option not necessarily always used and not the default.

[ReagentX]

Can you share an example of what you were saying and what you fixed? I am not entirely following what you want to see.

[sword4nsics-EOF]

I spent time to get it to do that automatically on my own computer to write who it was that "read" it rather than say "them". For court purposes it looks nicer and reads well to specify the contact name which is based off the device contacts name or rather offer the ability to choose the name if your contact name on the device is not actually their name. lol. Just a minor suggestion. Helps in my use case when exporting single conversations.

[ReagentX]

Replacing "them" with a name adds no information, in a 1:1 chat, "them" is unambiguous; you can even see the contact information in the message header below the timestamp.