iMessage Crashing From file:///??
5th Feb 2013
By now this is a pretty well known bug that if you type in file:/// (f in caps) in a lot of OSX apps, it will crash it. If you haven’t heard, see here or here or here. The worst part about this is someone could easily perform a denial of service attack on your iMessage app on any of your OSX machines by just sending you a quick message with 8 characters. You can try it right now as well……Oops, did I forget to mention? You will also send your own iMessage into a frezny crash loop…..
If you google around how to fix this, most blog posts would suggest you go and delete anything that starts with ‘chat’ in your ~/Library/Message folder (for example, Gizmodo). I would advice against it unless you don’t care about your chat history being completely erased. With a little terminal and sql you can easily fix it without having to remove your entire chat history.
The idea is pretty simple. The chat.db file that you were told to remove contains your chat history for iMessage. Instead of deleting the whole thing, you simply need to delete the culprit chat message that crashed your iMessage. We can easily do this with sqlite3 and a couple simple sql commands. Let’s get crackin.