MSN Messenger History Merger
Posted by Fernando Felman on March 21, 2007
As a consultant I’ve been sent to customers’ sites quite a lot. Many times I’m provided with a dedicated desktop for my work and I’m not allowed to plug my own laptop. This is usually no biggie as I’ve a USB flash drive that allows me to keep in sync all my settings, preferences, etc.
Saying that, there is one thing which I cannot keep in sync: the history files of the MSN Messenger. MSN Messenger saves conversations history in XML files – one file per recipient. Those files get updated every time a conversation is compete, e.g. every time the Messenger window is closed. This implementation means that each desktop saves its own history files and merging those history files is not an easy task. I tried to find a merging utility in the internet with no success so I’m left without options: I must implement the merging utility myself.
So, this is a long introduction to my latest open source project: the MSN History Merger. This utility will merge MSN Messenger history files from different instances into one complete history folder. The executable file can be downloaded from the Release page (no installation is required).
I do hope you’ll find it useful. If you do, please leave me a comment. Suggestions are also welcomed so feel free to use the discussion lists and the issues tracker to log suggestions and issues.
April 19, 2007 at 9:42 am
This is just what I have been looking for!
I’m still surprised Microsoft has yet to incorporate something like this themselves, after all google are able to with their ‘google talk’ application.
Thanks again.
April 19, 2007 at 10:46 am
Cheers, mate,
I’m happy you find it useful.
I think MS has always followed the ‘we only support the majority’ guide line. The merging feature is only used by the minority power-users so I’m not too surprised it’s not in their to-do list…
Enjoy.
April 24, 2007 at 8:06 am
thanks for this wonderfull tool. i am not very much an IT pro, downloaded the patch, but couldn’t use it as the message : need .Net framework v 2.0.50727 is required.
no clue how to do this.
probably not the right place to post this, but told you, not that much into this, and i needed help.
regards
Jay
April 24, 2007 at 10:39 am
The applicaiton requires the Microsoft .NET Framework Version 2.0.
You can download the framework from Microsoft web site (for free): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=0856EACB-4362-4B0D-8EDD-AAB15C5E04F5&displaylang=en
Hope it helps.
April 24, 2007 at 3:24 pm
Wow man. I’ve been looking for this since long time ago. I have to confess I LOVE YOU! I could really kiss you. Tongue and everything. xP
No, really, it works great. No matter the lenght of the .xml, and very fast also. And you even published the code… I’m a .NET developer… but lazy enough to not make this program. LOL.
Maybe I will add a feature to recognize the old Messenger Plus logs I still have (from back on 2002). Sometime… LOL.
Suggestion: when trace level is on “Warning”, information regardin which file has a problem would be useful.
Thanks again,
Carlos Sosa Albert
April 25, 2007 at 1:01 am
Hi and thanks for the very worm appreciation…
Please see yourself encouraged to add and modify the code - that’s the whole propose for me publishing the source code. If you want some explanation on how to code works (classes and interactions) please add a relevant request in the Project page and I’ll answer there. I’d like to maintain all the project-relevant documentation in the project web site (http://www.codeplex.com/MsnHistoryMerger), not this blog.
As for your suggestions, I’m not quite sure I understand your request. The log level (None, Error, Warning, Verbose) are aggregative - that is, the Warning level will log Errors & Warning, so if there is a problem with one of the files you should defiantly be able to see an error log using the Warnings log level. If this is not the case, please add a new issue in the project page and include some sample so I’ll be able to reproduce and fix this.
Enjoy.
April 25, 2007 at 2:13 pm
gosh, seriously im looking for this for ages.
i’ve been saving my histories, didn’t manage to get them to merge.
btw, msn has it archieve if it reaches 4-5mb as i notice.
nice work
April 28, 2007 at 7:21 am
this tool is very good,i have link it here:http://www.imxl.net/read.php/81.htm
thanks very much,i like it~
April 29, 2007 at 2:57 am
i can’t understand! how i can make this work?
if i got my msn at work when i connect home i will see the history from Work at home ?
April 29, 2007 at 3:17 am
[...] Fernando has created an application that merges multiple instances of conversation history, useful if you have two sets of logs, eg. at home and at work. [...]
April 29, 2007 at 4:23 am
CrAcK,
please visit the project page for instructions on how to use this utility (http://www.codeplex.com/MsnHistoryMerger).
In short, the utility will not let you “see the history from Work” when you’re connected at home, but it will allow to merge the histories from both environments. You will then be able to manually coy the merged histories to both your home and work machines.
If you need further assistance, please leave a request in the project’s discussions page (http://www.codeplex.com/MsnHistoryMerger/Thread/List.aspx) and I’ll answer there.
May 23, 2007 at 6:55 am
Just wanna say “Thanks”. It’s great.
June 10, 2007 at 10:29 pm
Thank you. Great program!
June 22, 2007 at 8:53 pm
Thank you… amazing little program and very usefull. Works like a charm. Been looking for something like this for sometime, too lazy to program it myself too… let’s call it professional lazyness or something.
Thanks a lot… great work!
July 2, 2007 at 1:43 pm
Wow. Finally, an intelligent, robust, unbloated, stand-alone app that does what you need it to do. Impressive.
I’ve been looking for this utility for quite a while. Thanks for creating it, and thanks especially for making it freeware.
I’m going to post a note about this utility on Facebook, so don’t be surprised if your downloads jump as more people learn about it.
August 19, 2007 at 11:42 pm
Bless you.
September 16, 2007 at 4:08 pm
Hi there!
Great tool. Only problem I (!) have is that I often re-install my pc and sometimes install different languages of msn. So i can merge the files, but then the data isnt correctly ordered anymore (date notation is different and so on). Do you know of a program which converts it all to english?
Thx,
Vincent
September 17, 2007 at 4:08 am
Thanks for the replay, Vincent.
If you could open a new issue in the project site (http://www.codeplex.com/MsnHistoryMerger/WorkItem/List.aspx) I’ll look into it to get you a fix.
It would be great if you could attach the sample files so I can reproduce the issues you’re experiencing.
Cheers,
F
September 17, 2007 at 2:25 pm
Ok added it! Was the previous fix-request already fixed in your online release? In other words: what happens if i select duplicate files to merge?
THX
Vinzzz
September 17, 2007 at 9:35 pm
Please post all issue-related posts & feature requests in the project site (codeplex.com/MsnHistoryMerger).
As for the question, duplicate messages are correctly handled by the latest version (1.3).
F
October 6, 2007 at 1:16 pm
I am not sure mine is working correctly. Every time I load it, it reverts to the default directories (two dont exist and one is the wrong MSN account). I would have thought the application would store a preferences file so that you didn’t have to change these each time. If there is one, where is it stored as something is going wrong here I think?
October 20, 2007 at 8:33 pm
I was trying to keep track of the disaster associated with Messenger on two machines…each with their own history. Tried other methods to merge without much luck and plenty of lost time. Installed this History Merger with great hopes but couldn’t get it to fire up…..alas, it was me that was the culprit- I did not have the net frame installed. Downloaded the latest V3.0, installed it and the History Merger worked flawlessly! Very nice unbloated, concise program. I thank you and so do my contacts (I no longer start a conversation in the wrong place due jumbled histories)!!!!
December 5, 2007 at 9:16 am
This is a magnificent piece of work. Due to its unstable nature, Windows XP crashed my machine quarterly, but thanks for your simple yet essential tool, all my MSN messages are now back into one piece. Now I am looking for a way to merge the MSN history on my mac - Microsoft manages MSN history on Windows and mac differently.
January 19, 2008 at 6:10 pm
Hi!
I just want to thank you for a wonderful program!
I was unsuccessfully trying to merge the files with notepad and wordpad when I tried google and found your program which worked perfect and saved me a lot of time
It’s really nice that it apparently can merge Swedish and English files successfully and do it in a consistent way.
February 2, 2008 at 11:30 pm
Does anyone know if MSN keeps a record of all conversations on their servers?
Also the conversation that saves automatically on the local computer is in XML format and it seems pretty easy to actually change the contents of the conversation by using an XML editor such as Oxygen. So does that mean if anyone wanted to,with the correct knowledge and software, they would be able to change the conversation?
March 10, 2008 at 8:47 pm
Hi,
Just a simple question: does the save history option have to be selected of keeping history in messenger or does it save these xml files alltoether?
March 10, 2008 at 9:07 pm
Hi Ronald,
I added a question on your behalf in the project site: http://www.codeplex.com/MsnHistoryMerger/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=23732.
Please post all questions related to this tool in the project site and not in this blog.
Cheers,
F