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Tuesday, November 05, 2013

Skype logs exporter

Solea's Time... by ERIO from flickr (CC-NC-SA)

Most chat applications of the old times stored their chat logs in plaintext format. I'm sure Skype sends copies of all your messages to NSA (and for all we know also every single other government agency in the world to hedge their bets) in plaintext, so they have your plaintext logs, but they never bothered to provide these logs to you as well.

Fortunately Skype seems to be storing all its local logs in a sqlite database, so I wrote a relatively straightforward export script that converts it to a bunch of plaintext files (plus some image files for everybody's avatars).

It should work on any operating system you can get Ruby working on just fine. (you'll just need to install sqlite3 gem)

Since I'm not NSA, I only have my own Skype logs to work with, so it's very likely I missed a lot of important things - and in any case the format of exported logs might be a bit awkward. You can help me here with pull requests, or by emailing any Skype main.db the script can't handle reasonably to me.  (as we know the bad guys already have it anyway, so don't worry too much about your privacy)

By the way - I haven't been testing any of my code on Ruby 1.8 in quite a while now. Most will probably still work, but I'd really recommend an upgrade to 1.9 or 2.0.

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