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Guide

Business SMS archive

Bring the texts already on a phone into your account, find them, and take a copy out.

Business texts often live only on a phone. The archive keeps them in your SMSKit account, next to the messages you send and receive through SMSKit. You can search them in one list and export them when you need a copy.

What to know first

  • Plan. The archive is part of the Standard plan. On Free, archive reads and exports return 403.
  • Retention. Messages are kept for 30 days on Standard, then they expire. Export them before they expire if you need a longer record.
  • Export size. Export returns up to 50,000 messages per request. For more, narrow the export by date and run it again.
  • Import reach. An import can go back up to 90 days. A device can store up to 5,000 messages in a shared 24-hour archive window, and you can run one import per device per 24 hours.
  • Import is on request. Older history is not continuous capture. You ask for it, and it runs once. New messages sync only after you turn on archiving on the phone.
  • Consent is on the phone. Archiving needs SMS and Contacts access, granted on the Android phone. The dashboard and API cannot grant it for you.

1. Import the phone's SMS history

You need a phone paired to your account.

  1. On the phone, open the SMSKit app, then Device Details, then Data & Archive.
  2. Turn on Enable archiving. Read the explanation and grant SMS and Contacts access.
  3. Tap Archive existing messages on the phone. You can also open the device under Devices in the dashboard and use Archive existing messages there. Both need a fresh Android report that shows consent and both permissions.

The inbox and sent messages upload in the background. Repeated messages are skipped, so a second import does not create duplicates. The dashboard device page shows the status of the import.

After you enable archiving, new messages sync while the gateway runs. Android may delay background work, so treat that as a catch-up, not a deadline. If a permission is missing, see Set up phone archiving.

2. Search the archive

In the dashboard, open Inbox, choose a device and type in Search messages. Imported, received and SMSKit-sent messages appear in one list.

The search is a text match on the message text and the phone number. It finds the words you type as part of a message. It does not rank results or allow for typos.

The same search works over the API with your API key, on GET /api/v1/messages?q=:

BASH 
curl "https://api.smskit.cloud/api/v1/messages?q=invoice&limit=20" \
  -H "X-Api-Key: sk_live_your_key"

The response lists messages with page counts. You can also filter by peer, direction, origin and date. See the archive API.

3. Export as CSV or NDJSON

In the dashboard Inbox, choose Export, then CSV or JSON (NDJSON). The file holds the messages SMSKit still retains.

Over the API, call GET /api/v1/archive/export with an optional date range. NDJSON is the default. Add format=csv for CSV.

CSV
bash 
curl "https://api.smskit.cloud/api/v1/archive/export?from=2026-01-01&format=csv" \
  -H "X-Api-Key: sk_live_your_key" -o sms-archive.csv
NDJSON
bash 
curl "https://api.smskit.cloud/api/v1/archive/export?from=2026-01-01" \
  -H "X-Api-Key: sk_live_your_key" -o sms-archive.ndjson

A request returns at most 50,000 messages. If your archive is larger, the file ends with a line that says it was cut short. Set from and to to export the rest in parts. Export before messages expire at 30 days if you want a longer record.

Read more on the archive page.

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