Unzuckify

This repository has a small Python application which allows me to receive an email notification when somebody sends me a Facebook message.

This is a pretty tiny application and custom-designed for a specific use case. If you're interested in something more general, you might want to also take a look at these resources:

• My blog post on how I reverse-engineered the API
• Scott Conway's fork, providing the ~same features with more configuration options

At the time when I created this project I was unable to find anyone else online who had reverse-engineered the new (circa 2020) Messenger API, but I'm sure others have since popped up or will soon.

Note: this code is not actively maintained, as I no longer actively use the application. As a result, you shouldn't expect it to work exactly as listed, because Facebook regularly changes their APIs to break third-party clients (amongst other reasons). While I may be able to offer some tips here and there, I can't promise formal support for this project in the same way that other open-source projects under Radian LLC receive. You're welcome to fork the project and bring it up to date with the latest Facebook changes if you wish to use it.

Why?

I don't like Facebook as a company, and I don't want to support them by using their products, including Messenger. However, when I came around to this point of view, I already had a number of existing contacts on Messenger. I migrated everyone I talked to regularly onto other platforms, but in case someone messaged me out of the blue, I still wanted to know about that, so I could redirect them onto Signal or SMS.

With the help of this application, I can make sure I won't miss it when a very old contact happens to message me on Facebook, while not having to ever actively check Messenger or keep it on my phone.

How?

I reverse-engineered the Messenger authentication flow and the recently rewritten GraphQL API, and created a command-line utility that can, in the same manner as the browser:

• Fetch the list of threads that would show up on Messenger, their names, the users in each thread, the last message that was sent, who sent it, and whether it is unread according to the server.
• Send a message to a thread.
• Mark a thread as read if it is unread.

This all turned out to be fairly straightforward. The protocol and code is obfuscated, but nowhere near enough to foil basic reverse engineering techniques.

After creating the command-line utility, I wrote a Bash script that wrapped it with the following logic:

1. Fetch my list of threads.
2. Identify any threads that have unread messages and use SendGrid to notify me about them via email.
3. Mark those threads as read.
4. Login to a separate Facebook account and send my primary account a random inspirational quote by direct message.
5. In step 2, the notifications for messages from the account in step 4 are sent to a separate email address that is monitored by Dead Man's Snitch. This, combined with step 4, ensures that as long as everything is in working order, Dead Man's Snitch will get an email every time I run the script.

Then I run the script on a cron job every few hours. If I get a message, it's forwarded to email. If the API changes out from under me, or something else goes wrong, I also get an email because Dead Man's Snitch will stop receiving notifications.

Prior work

I previously used Messenger Mirror to accomplish the same thing as this project. However, because Messenger Mirror relied on having an entire Chrome instance running in Selenium 24/7, I didn't want to have that running on my laptop (it would eat resources for no good reason). Unfortunately, after a couple weeks, Facebook banned the IP for my VPS, so I couldn't run the application there anymore. This is what inspired me to try reverse engineering the browser API directly, since if I did that, it would be far less resource intensive to run the application on my laptop in the background.

Setup

If you just want to use the CLI (perhaps as proof of concept for developing your own Messenger client using the reverse engineered API), setup is quite simple. Install Poetry, run poetry install and poetry shell, then you are good to go:

% ./unzuckify.py -u [email protected] -p your-password -v inbox
% ./unzuckify.py -u [email protected] -p your-password -v send
    -t thread-id-from-inbox -m "Some text message"
% ./unzuckify.py -u [email protected] -p your-password -v read
    -t thread-id-from-inbox

Cookies are automatically cached in ~/.cache/unzuckify/cookies.json, and are separated per email address so you can use different accounts in parallel. Omit -v to not log all the intermediate debugging info. Only inbox prints to stdout, and the output is JSON.

If you additionally want to set up a Messenger-to-email bridge like I have, then you should install jq and sign up for a free SendGrid account. Also go to Heroku, provision a Dead Man's Snitch addon, and get the email endpoint for the snitch. Then create a .env file in the repo as follows:

[email protected]  # facebook login
PRIMARY_PASSWORD='your-password'

[email protected]  # 2nd account login
SECONDARY_PASSWORD='other-password'

SENDGRID_API_KEY=SG.REDACTED  # from SendGrid
[email protected]  # from Dead Man's Snitch
SENTINEL_NAME='John Smith'  # Facebook name of 2nd account

[email protected]  # SendGrid verified sender
[email protected]  # where to receive notifications

Note for FROM_EMAIL, ideally you own a domain and can prove ownership of it, and this email is on that domain. According to the SendGrid documentation, if you use something like a Gmail address, your notifications are likely to get flagged by spam filters because it can be proven that Gmail was not actually the one to send the email, which looks suspicious. If you don't own a personal domain, may I suggest doing business with Namecheap and Forward Email?

Now you just need to set up the script to run on a semi-regular basis, for example by creating a cron job:

crontab - <<"EOF"
0 */3 * * * sh -c '. "$HOME/.profile" && ~/dev/unzuckify/unzuckify.bash'
EOF