Archive all of the messages in your Facebook Messages Inbox

readme.md

Facebook - Archive All Messages

Because who doesn't have an inbox full of "I got a new phone", event-based group chats, and old lingering messages in their Facebook Messages?

Surprisingly, Facebook has not implemented a way to archive many messages in your inbox. This script provides that solution.

Quickstart

Load Facebook Messages in a new tab.

Open the JavaScript console and paste the contents of jquery.min.js into the console.

Paste the contents of archive-all-facebook-messages.js into the console.

If you want to only test the results before actually running the archiving, there's a param for that:

archive_all(testOnly=true);

When you're ready to run for real:

archive_all();

Caveats

• Currently only detects the list of messages visible to the user in the page. You can work around this by repeatedly scrolling the message list pane to the bottom until all messages are loaded. I plan to automate this step soon.
• There is no way to whitelist certain messages from being archived. Currently, you can manually unarchive select messages from the archived view.
• Sometimes the messages page remains cached after the script reloads it. Reloading it once by hand solves this.

archive-all-facebook-messages.js

function archive_all(testOnly) {
    var someMessages, archiveButton;

    if (testOnly === "undefined") { testOnly = false; }

    someMessages = $("li._k- span.accessible_elem");
    console.log("Found", someMessages.length, "messages to archive in your inbox.");

    archiveButton = null;
    someMessages.each(function () {
        if (testOnly) {
            console.log("*DEBUG Only* Archived:", $(this).text());
        } else {
            archiveButton = $(this).parent().parent().parent().prev().children()[1];
            archiveButton.click();
        }
    });

    if (!testOnly) {
        location.reload();
    }
}