How to get IM and SMS out of Harmattan in a machine-readable way?
 

Hi community,

I was able to build importers into Pidgin for OpenWhatsapp and Skype (http://git.chubig.net/misc.git/blob/HEAD:/skype2pid and http://git.chubig.net/misc.git/blob/HEAD:/waz2pid resp.) by using sqlite3 to read their message databases and import all messages older than a (independently stored) ID.

I would now like to do something similar for my text and IM messages in Harmattan on the N9. Reading around, I found that tracker-sparql should be able to do something like this, but I didn’t get it to work right for me. What I need is:

a) a way to list IDs of all messages (SMS and IM) greater than a given ID (or, if IDs are not incremented strictly monotonically, older than a given date)

b) a way to get the sender/recipient/content/timestamp of a message in a machine-readable way (four different command invocations I can just "$()" would be ideal).

Could any of you point me at some human-readable introduction to the tracker-sparql documentation/database layout? The things I found online are all very nice, but either rather abstract or already fitted to exactly one purpose (e.g. "print all messages").

Furthermore, I will have the issue of getting the extracted messages to my computer, the solutions I thought of so far are:

a) build a sqlite database of new messages on the phone, then transfer that database to the computer and parse it there (tedious)

b) build a directory tree on the phone, then rsync it to the computer (requires some rsync magic and/or the logs to stay on the phone, possibly slow if rsync takes a while)

c) call ssh with a specific command to get each piece of data (very slow!)

d) magic!

I would be very thankful for any hints :)