icodein / abcs

Not An Acronym...

ABCS is a simple HTTP server which can be used to send and receive iMessages programmatically on a machine running macOS. ABCS totally isn't an acronym for "Apple Business Chat Sucks". The great thing about this approach is that you don't need a human on the other end, making it an excellent tool for bots and virtual assistants.

The tool itself is super simple. Whenever a new iMessage is received, it will post a small JSON blob to an endpoint of your choosing. When you want to send a message, you can configure a listening address (defaults to localhost:11106) and hit the root endpoint with a small JSON blob of the message you want to send, and to whom.

Example Usage

To build the tool, just do go build . in the project folder.

./abcs -endpoint=https://example.com/cool_endpoint -listen=127.0.0.1:8080

This command will start a web server on 127.0.0.1:8080 listening for requests. If you send a JSON blob like the following to this endpoint, the iMessage will be sent.

{
    "to":"1234567890",
    "message":"ABCS is not an acronym. Remember this."
}

When you receive an iMessage, a JSON blob like the following will be POSTed to the endpoint https://example.com/cool_endpoint.

{
    "from":"1234567890",
    "message":"Yeah, I get it. ABCS isn't an acronym."
}

Other Stuff

This tool is inherently insecure, since there is no authentication baked in. Rather, it is reccomended to use a VPC or some sort of private network (I recommend Tailscale) to ensure that this server exposed publicly. This tool is used in production for Operand, though if reliability is important I'd reccomend building some additional stuff on top of this. It would be great to eventually have multiple hosted Mac minis and automatically detect machine failures, all that jazz.

Tools shouldn't limit, they should empower. We at Operand disagree that a human should be required on the other end of an iMessage conversation with a business. But of course, ABCS isn't an acronym for "Apple Business Chat Sucks" and in no way intends to disparage a product of another company.

Have a beautiful day <3.

P.S. Big thanks to https://github.com/golift/imessage, I spent a bunch of time last night figuring out the iMessage stuff myself, only to discover that someone had done it really well and open sourced it as a tool. This tool is simply a wrapper of this existing work, and adds server functionality.