Workaround to View All Old Messages in Facebook

Facebook is hitting another glitch, this time round with Facebook Messages. Since around early July 2012, many Facebook users who log on to view the messages, emails and conversations with friends, colleagues, family members, or even customers and suppliers, are shocked to discover all their old messages “disappeared” from inbox which otherwise full of hundreds if not thousands of threads.

Luckily the old messages are not actually “missing” or “deleted” from Facebook account. Instead, probably due to some glitches, Facebook Messages only display the latest 20 conversations on the each Messages views (Inbox, Other, Sent, Archived, Email and Spam). And the “hidden” messages can still be retrieved by searching for the content in the email or the name of the friend (but even searching also only returns 20 results).

If you can’t remember who you’ve talked to or there are simply too many messages to look for, here’s a workaround to look at the whole inbox of Facebook Messages, just append ?page=# (with # been a digit reflecting the page number beginning from 1) to the end of the Facebook Messages’ URL to access the messages page by page.

Note that the “next page” is starting from page 1. In other words, page 2 is page 1 in the URL.

For example, to display 21th to 40th conversation threads which is on the next page, use the following URL:

https://www.facebook.com/messages/?page=1

Likewise for the subsequent page 2 for messages from 41th to 60th, and so on:

https://www.facebook.com/messages/?page=2

To view the archive, unread, sent, email or spam that are shown using query, append the &page=# to the end of the URL, with # been the number of subsequent pages, starting from 1 as page 2.

For example, the following URL shows the conversation 21 to 40 in Archived of Facebook Messages:

https://www.facebook.com/messages/?query=is%3Aarchived&page=1

The trick above should work in messaging system of Facebook Fan Pages too.

Alternatively, just use the Facebook Mobile app for iOS and Android, etc., which does not seem to have this issue.