August 16, 2021
iMessage Integration
• Many Clay members use iMessage to communicate with close colleagues and friends. iMessage is where new people become professional acquaintances, and professional acquaintances become personal friends.
Today, we’re excited to debut a magical, first-of-its-kind iMessage integration that adds the most important people in your life to Clay.
Because of the complexity of this integration, we’re releasing it as a technical preview first so you can provide feedback. A few important questions to answer:
1. How do I get started?
Download Clay for Mac, or quit and reopen it if it’s already installed. Then go to Settings > Add iMessage, and follow the onscreen instructions. You’ll be prompted to allow access to Contacts, enable full disk access, and then your contacts will sync within a few seconds.
2. Who will Clay import from my iMessage?
Everyone, mostly. Clay excludes non-people like shortcodes, and merges with existing people where there’s high confidence that people are the same. As with other integrations, more relevant people will be surfaced more often in Clay so you shouldn’t need to remove people even if you haven’t talked to them in a while. Lastly, Clay will enrich phone numbers where possible, will use the name from your contacts if none is found, and will show just the phone number otherwise.
3. Does Clay import the content of my messages?
Emphatically, no. We’ve added our iMessage integration to our comprehensive privacy and security policy so you can get the full details, but Clay specifically never reads or uploads the contents of messages.
4. Why is this integration only available on Clay’s Mac app?
Apple, unfortunately, doesn’t offer an API or SDK for iMessage, so the simplest and most secure way for us to offer this integration is on a Mac.
5. Why does Clay ask for full disk access?
One of our core philosophies with any integration is to ask for the minimum number of permissions or information necessary to make the experience magical. Recent versions of macOS restrict access to iMessage data, so the only way for Clay to integrate with iMessage is to have full disk access — there’s no more restrictive access we can ask for, but if this ever changes we’ll modify the integration accordingly.
6. Will this negatively affect my iMessage? Will Clay send messages on my behalf?
No, and no. The integration is read-only, so it can’t affect your iMessage at all. And you can always remove the integration (and/or any data it imported to your account) in Settings.
We can’t wait for you to get started! Send us your feedback over email, or (appropriately) over iMessage.