Skip to main content
What ships is a notarized, stapled DMG. Everything the app needs is inside the bundle, including imsg, the helper that carries sends to Messages, so you install nothing else. No Homebrew, no Terminal. Requirements on your Mac: macOS 14 or newer, signed into iMessage in Messages.app.

​
Your steps, in order

1

Install

Open the DMG and drag Bartleby into Applications. It opens normally on first launch. The app is Developer ID signed, notarized, and stapled, so Gatekeeper needs no right-click ritual.
2

Grant Full Disk Access

Bartleby reads the local Messages database directly, so it needs this to see anything.Go to System Settings → Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access → + → Applications → Bartleby, toggle it on, then quit and reopen Bartleby.
The inbox is empty until this is done.
3

Send your first message

macOS asks to allow Bartleby to control Messages. Allow it. Sends travel through the bundled imsg as Apple Events to Messages.app, the same sanctioned path Messages automation always uses.
That is the whole setup. The signing identity is stable across updates, so both grants survive every future version. Granted once, kept.

​
What you should know

  • Bartleby reads your own messages on your own Mac. Nothing is shared, synced, or uploaded.
  • It never writes to the Messages database and never marks a chat read in Messages.
  • Everything Bartleby itself stores lives in ~/Library/Application Support/Bartleby/.

​
Troubleshooting

​
The inbox is empty after step 2

You granted Full Disk Access to a different copy of the app, one still sitting in Downloads. Remove the Bartleby entry from Full Disk Access, add it again pointing at /Applications/Bartleby.app, and relaunch.