msgr

Minimal multi-account channel mailbox CLI — Slack and Telegram — built for LLM agents and shell scripts.

The core idea: an agent shouldn't manage timestamps or connections. read is a mailbox — it prints only what's new since that consumer's last read and advances a cursor. send posts. Everything is a one-shot command; no daemon required. read/listen emit JSONL by default (structured, reliable for agents & scripts); add --text for human-readable output.

msgr send "#ops" "deploy finished"
echo "long report..." | msgr send standup       # alias from config
msgr read "news:@daily_updates"                  # only new posts since last read
msgr read "#alerts" --as pnl-loop               # independent cursor per agent
msgr read "#alerts" --last 50 --text            # human-readable (ISO time)
msgr read "#alerts" --thread 1712345678.123     # one whole thread (root + replies)
msgr read "#alerts" --peek                      # look without consuming
msgr read "#alerts" --json                      # JSONL for scripts
msgr send "work:@alice" "lunch?"                 # direct message
msgr read "#alerts" "#ops" --as watcher --block --timeout 3600
                                                # long-poll: block until any
                                                # address has new messages,
                                                # print them (exit 3: timeout)
msgr list                                   # what the bot can see
msgr listen                                     # ingest into the durable spool
msgr read "acct:*" --as reception --follow      # durable, resumable live stream
msgr context "acct:*" --since 1d                # readable digest of recent chat
msgr react "#ops" 1712345678.123 white_check_mark
msgr login news                              # one-time Telegram session setup

Addresses

URI-like: the account is the scheme, the target is written in the platform's own syntax (like mailto:foo@bar.com).

dl:#ops              Slack channel in account "dl"
dl:@alice            DM with a person
dl:@                 the operator's own DM
tg:@some_channel     Telegram channel/handle
tg:-100123456        Telegram chat by numeric ID
robot:foo@bar.com    email recipient (email accounts, when supported)
robot:INBOX          mail folder
#ops  @alice  @      no prefix = the default account
dl:*                 EVERY channel of an account (spool-backed read only)
standup              any alias from the config

The default account is $MSGR_ACCOUNT, else default_account in the config, else the only account configured.

Config

First found of: $MSGR_CONFIG, ~/.config/msgr/config.toml, /etc/msgr/config.toml.

default_account = "work"

[accounts.work]
platform = "slack"
bot_token = "xoxb-..."
app_token = "xapp-..."      # only needed for `listen` (Socket Mode)
owner = "U0123456789"       # optional: the operator's user ID — their
                            # messages get an authenticated "(owner)" mark
                            # in read/listen output, so agents can tell the
                            # operator apart from anyone merely claiming to be

[accounts.family]
platform = "slack"
bot_token = "xoxb-..."

[accounts.news]
platform = "telegram"
api_id = 12345
api_hash = "0123456789abcdef"
phone = "+15551234567"
session = "~/.local/state/msgr/news.session"   # default: <env>.session

[aliases]
standup = "work:#standup"
alerts = "work:C0123456789"    # private Slack channels: use the ID
daily = "news:@daily_updates"

Read scoping

By default an account reads anything its account can see. allow_read restricts it — for accounts with more access than the agent's business:

[accounts.personal]
platform = "telegram"
allow_read = ["@exchange_news", "@status_updates"]   # nothing else readable

Posting is opt-in

Accounts are quiet by default: read/listen always work, but send, react, and uploads are refused until the account is armed:

[accounts.work]
allow_post = true                      # whole account writable
[accounts.news]
# no allow_post -> pure notetaker: can read, can never post
[accounts.other]
allow_post = ["#ops", "@alice"]        # only these addresses

Durable spool (reliable real-time reads)

read polls an account's history on demand — great with zero setup, but a consumer reading the raw real-time socket (listen) loses any message that arrives during a restart/reconnect gap. The spool closes that gap:

• Run msgr listen <account> as an always-on ingester. Instead of printing events, it appends every one to a durable, append-only per-account log (add --print to also echo to stdout for debugging). The sole-listener flock guarantees exactly one writer.
• read <addr…> --as <name> then auto-detects the ingester (via that same flock) and reads from the spool with its per-consumer cursor. A reader can restart and backfill from where it left off — nothing is silently lost. If no ingester is running, read falls back to the on-demand history poll (unchanged), so msgr read --last 10 on a laptop still works with no setup.
• msgr read "acct:*" --as reception consumes every channel of the account (a receptionist); acct:#chan filters to one channel. --block tails the spool live (returns after the first new batch; a fresh consumer starts "from now"). --follow is a continuous stream: it keeps tailing and prints each new event, advancing the cursor per event, until --timeout (0 = forever) — a durable, resumable drop-in for listen. Like --block, a fresh cursor starts "from now" and an existing cursor resumes/ backfills the gap — a new follower never replays history. Add --from-start to opt into emitting the retained backlog first, then tailing.
• --last N and --thread <ts> are always direct one-shot API calls, never spooled.

The journal doubles as ~a week of situational-awareness memory: it is time-retained (SPOOL_RETENTION_DAYS, default 7 — tunable). Rotation drops events older than the window (and caps size); _seq stays strictly increasing across the prune (a persisted high-water mark survives even a prune-to-empty), so cursors are never silently overtaken.

context — situational-awareness digest

msgr context [address] [--since <spec>] renders the journal as a compact, human/agent-readable digest (not JSONL) — load "what's going on in the chats" in one shot. It reads the spool (offline, complete incl. thread replies).

msgr context "acct:*"                 # all channels, everything retained (~week)
msgr context "acct:#ops" --since 1d   # one channel, last day
msgr context "acct:*" --since today
msgr context "acct:*" --thread 1712345678.123   # zoom into one thread
msgr context "acct:*" --json          # filtered raw events (JSONL) for scripts

• Address grammar mirrors read: acct:* / acct: = all channels; acct:#chan = one channel; omitted = default account, all channels.
• --since accepts 7d / 1d / 2h / today / YYYY-MM-DD; default is everything retained.
• Rendering groups by channel (readable #name when cached, else the id), orders chronologically, nests thread replies under their parent, marks the (owner), and shows attachments as [attachment: <name>] — referenced, never inlined. If no journal exists yet, it prints a one-line note (run msgr listen <account> to start one).

Layout (under the state dir — $MSGR_STATE_DIR, else ~/.local/state/msgr, created 0700):

<state>/spool/<account>.jsonl        append-only log; each line is a normal
                                     read entry + an internal "_seq"
<state>/cursors/<account>/<name>.json  per-consumer last-consumed _seq

_seq is a strictly-increasing, never-reused integer. The spool auto-rotates (keeping the most recent lines) once it grows past a cap; _seq continues across rotation. If a consumer falls so far behind that its cursor was rotated away, read prints a one-line warning to stderr and resumes from the oldest retained event (never silently skips, never errors).

Message schema

read and listen emit one JSON object per message (same shape on every platform):

field	meaning
id	the message ID — pass it verbatim to --thread / react / replies
time	ISO8601 UTC timestamp
account	msgr account name
channel	channel / chat / folder id within the account
addr	canonical reply address (account:channel)
thread	parent/root message id, or null
from	sender display name
user	sender's platform id (raw), or null
owner	true if the sender is the configured operator (authenticated)
text	message body
trust, reactions, files, files_note	present when applicable

Reformat time, never id (the id is the platform's message key). Add --text for a human-readable rendering instead of JSON.

Notes

• Slack: the bot must be a member of channels it reads or posts to. Public channel names resolve via API; private channels need an ID or alias unless the app has the groups:read scope. @person resolves by username, display name, or U… ID. listen uses Socket Mode (needs an app-level token with connections:write); minimum bot scopes for the rest: chat:write, channels:read, channels:history, users:read (+ groups:history for private channels, im:write for DMs, reactions:write for react).
• Telegram: uses a user-account MTProto session (Telethon). Run msgr login <account> once interactively; after that reads/sends are one-shot. The session file is as sensitive as being logged in — guard it.
• read --block is the long-poll gate for agent loops: if nothing is new it blocks (cheap API polling, no LLM anywhere) until one of the addresses has messages, then prints them and advances cursors atomically — wake and data in one command. Exit 3 on --timeout. A fresh cursor starts "from now" (a blocking read never fires on old history). Add --peek to block without consuming (shell-gate pattern: a supervisor blocks, then spawns an agent that reads for itself). Slack thread replies are included by default; --no-threads to exclude.
• read --thread <id> returns one whole thread — the root message plus every reply, reactions included — in the same JSON schema as a timeline read. It's a one-shot read (no cursor, no blocking): conversations.history returns only top-level timeline messages, so historical in-thread replies are invisible to a plain read; pass the id of the root (or any message in the thread) to pull the full exchange. Slack-only for now.
• Attachments: read downloads files (≤20 MB) to ~/.local/state/msgr/files/ and appends [attachment: /path] to the message — point your agent's file-reading tool at the path to view images. --no-files skips downloads. Slack needs the files:read scope; without it you get a files_note naming the undownloadable attachments.
• Message fields: each message carries ts (the platform message ID — pass it verbatim to --thread/react; Slack's is an epoch-like key, Telegram's is the integer id) and time (ISO8601 UTC, human/LLM readable). Reformat time, never ts.
• Cursors live in ~/.local/state/msgr/cursors/, one per (consumer, account, channel). First read of a channel returns only the last 20 messages rather than all history.
• Not yet: Telegram in listen/channels; email as a platform (the model maps cleanly: env = mailbox account, #folder channels with IMAP UID cursors, @address sends via SMTP, MIME attachments to the spool, allow_read scoping to folders).

Install

pip install -e .                       # Slack send/read: stdlib only
pip install -e '.[telegram,listen]'    # + Telethon, + Socket Mode listen