🔪 Facebook Messenger to email bridge based on reverse engineered auth and GraphQL APIs.

Related tags

GraphQLunzuckify
Overview

Unzuckify

This repository has a small Python application which allows me to receive an email notification when somebody sends me a Facebook message.

Why?

I don't like Facebook as a company, and I don't want to support them by using their products, including Messenger. However, when I came around to this point of view, I already had a number of existing contacts on Messenger. I migrated everyone I talked to regularly onto other platforms, but in case someone messaged me out of the blue, I still wanted to know about that, so I could redirect them onto Signal or SMS.

With the help of this application, I can make sure I won't miss it when a very old contact happens to message me on Facebook, while not having to ever actively check Messenger or keep it on my phone.

How?

I reverse-engineered the Messenger authentication flow and the recently rewritten GraphQL API, and created a command-line utility that can, in the same manner as the browser:

  • Fetch the list of threads that would show up on Messenger, their names, the users in each thread, the last message that was sent, who sent it, and whether it is unread according to the server.
  • Send a message to a thread.
  • Mark a thread as read if it is unread.

This all turned out to be fairly straightforward. The protocol and code is obfuscated, but nowhere near enough to foil basic reverse engineering techniques.

After creating the command-line utility, I wrote a Bash script that wrapped it with the following logic:

  1. Fetch my list of threads.
  2. Identify any threads that have unread messages and use SendGrid to notify me about them via email.
  3. Mark those threads as read.
  4. Login to a separate Facebook account and send my primary account a random inspirational quote by direct message.
  5. In step 2, the notifications for messages from the account in step 4 are sent to a separate email address that is monitored by Dead Man's Snitch. This, combined with step 4, ensures that as long as everything is in working order, Dead Man's Snitch will get an email every time I run the script.

Then I run the script on a cron job every few hours. If I get a message, it's forwarded to email. If the API changes out from under me, or something else goes wrong, I also get an email because Dead Man's Snitch will stop receiving notifications.

Prior work

I previously used Messenger Mirror to accomplish the same thing as this project. However, because Messenger Mirror relied on having an entire Chrome instance running in Selenium 24/7, I didn't want to have that running on my laptop (it would eat resources for no good reason). Unfortunately, after a couple weeks, Facebook banned the IP for my VPS, so I couldn't run the application there anymore. This is what inspired me to try reverse engineering the browser API directly, since if I did that, it would be far less resource intensive to run the application on my laptop in the background.

Setup

If you just want to use the CLI (perhaps as proof of concept for developing your own Messenger client using the reverse engineered API), setup is quite simple. Install Poetry, run poetry install and poetry shell, then you are good to go:

% ./unzuckify.py -u [email protected] -p your-password -v inbox
% ./unzuckify.py -u [email protected] -p your-password -v send
    -t thread-id-from-inbox -m "Some text message"
% ./unzuckify.py -u [email protected] -p your-password -v read
    -t thread-id-from-inbox

Cookies are automatically cached in ~/.cache/unzuckify/cookies.json, and are separated per email address so you can use different accounts in parallel. Omit -v to not log all the intermediate debugging info. Only inbox prints to stdout, and the output is JSON.

If you additionally want to set up a Messenger-to-email bridge like I have, then you should install jq and sign up for a free SendGrid account. Also go to Heroku, provision a Dead Man's Snitch addon, and get the email endpoint for the snitch. Then create a .env file in the repo as follows:

[email protected]  # facebook login
PRIMARY_PASSWORD='your-password'

[email protected]  # 2nd account login
SECONDARY_PASSWORD='other-password'

SENDGRID_API_KEY=SG.REDACTED  # from SendGrid
[email protected]  # from Dead Man's Snitch
SENTINEL_NAME='John Smith'  # Facebook name of 2nd account

[email protected]  # SendGrid verified sender
[email protected]  # where to receive notifications

Note for FROM_EMAIL, ideally you own a domain and can prove ownership of it, and this email is on that domain. According to the SendGrid documentation, if you use something like a Gmail address, your notifications are likely to get flagged by spam filters because it can be proven that Gmail was not actually the one to send the email, which looks suspicious. If you don't own a personal domain, may I suggest doing business with Namecheap and Forward Email?

Now you just need to set up the script to run on a semi-regular basis, for example by creating a cron job:

crontab - <<"EOF"
0 */3 * * * sh -c '. "$HOME/.profile" && ~/dev/unzuckify/unzuckify.bash'
EOF
Owner
Radon Rosborough
Software engineer recently graduated from Harvey Mudd College studying computer science. Interests include package management and Emacs, or both at once.
Radon Rosborough
A small command-line tool for interacting with GQL APIs

igqloo A small tool for interacting with GQL APIs Arguments, mutations, aliases are all supported. Other features, such as fragments, are left unsuppo

Joshua Mottaz 7 Dec 20, 2021
Lightning fast and portable programming language!

Photon Documentation in English Lightning fast and portable programming language! What is Photon? Photon is a programming language aimed at filling th

William 58 Dec 27, 2022
Enable idempotent operations in POST and PATCH endpoints

Idempotency Header ASGI Middleware A middleware for making POST and PATCH endpoints idempotent. The purpose of the middleware is to guarantee that exe

Sondre Lillebø Gundersen 12 Dec 28, 2022
Python script to like all posts from a selected Anilist profile

AniLiker: A python autoliker What's the point of this project? This project was a way to learn GraphQL, and also create a project that I've been inter

Iván Pérez 9 Nov 25, 2022
UltraGraphQL - a GraphQL interface for querying and modifying RDF data on the Web.

UltraGraphQL - cloned from https://git.rwth-aachen.de/i5/ultragraphql Updated or extended files: build.gradle: updated maven to use maven {url "https:

DrSnowbird 1 Jan 07, 2023
This is a minimal project using graphene with django and user authentication to expose a graphql endpoint.

Welcome This is a minimal project using graphene with django and user authentication to expose a graphql endpoint. Definitely checkout how I have mana

yosef salmalian 1 Nov 18, 2021
RPyC (Remote Python Call) - A transparent and symmetric RPC library for python

RPyC (pronounced like are-pie-see), or Remote Python Call, is a transparent library for symmetrical remote procedure calls, clustering, and distribute

1.3k Jan 05, 2023
A new GraphQL library for Python 🍓

Strawberry GraphQL Python GraphQL library based on dataclasses Installation ( Quick Start ) The quick start method provides a server and CLI to get go

Strawberry GraphQL 2.8k Jan 01, 2023
This is a simple Python that will parse instanceStats GraphQL Query into a CSV

GraphQL Python Labs - by Gabs the CSE Table of Contents About The Project Getting Started Prerequisites Installation and Usage Roadmap Contributing Li

Gabriel (Gabs) Cerioni 1 Oct 27, 2021
GraphQL Engine built with Python 3.6+ / asyncio

Tartiflette is a GraphQL Server implementation built with Python 3.6+. Summary Motivation Status Usage Installation Installation dependencies Tartifle

tartiflette 839 Dec 31, 2022
This is a graphql api build using ariadne python that serves a graphql-endpoint at port 3002 to perform language translation and identification using deep learning in python pytorch.

Language Translation and Identification this machine/deep learning api that will be served as a graphql-api using ariadne, to perform the following ta

crispengari 2 Dec 30, 2021
Gerenciar a velocidade da internet banda larga

Monitoramento da Velocidade da internet 📶 Status do Projeto: ✔️ (pronto) Tópicos ✍️ Descrição do projeto Funcionalidades Deploy da Aplicação Pré-requ

Bárbara Guerbas de Figueiredo 147 Nov 02, 2022
Django GraphQL User Management

Django GraphQL User Management An app that explores User management with GraphQL using Graphene in Django. Topics covered: Login. Log Out. Authenticat

0101 Solutions 4 Feb 22, 2022
Generate daily updated visualizations of user and repository statistics from the GitHub API using GitHub Actions

Generate daily updated visualizations of user and repository statistics from the GitHub API using GitHub Actions for any combination of private and public repositories - dark mode supported

Adam Ross 15 Dec 31, 2022
graphw00f is Server Engine Fingerprinting utility for software security professionals looking to learn more about what technology is behind a given GraphQL endpoint.

graphw00f - GraphQL Server Fingerprinting graphw00f (inspired by wafw00f) is the GraphQL fingerprinting tool for GQL endpoints. Table of Contents How

Dolev Farhi 282 Jan 04, 2023
Burp Suite extension to log GraphQL operations as a comment

Burp GraphQL Logger A very simple, straightforward extension that logs GraphQL operations as a comment in the Proxy view. To enable the highlight, unc

22 Jul 02, 2022
A Django GraphQL Starter that uses graphene and graphene_django to interface GraphQL.

Django GraphQL Starter GraphQL is a query language for APIs and a runtime for fulfilling those queries with your existing data... According to the doc

0101 Solutions 1 Jan 10, 2022
ASGI support for the Tartiflette GraphQL engine

tartiflette-asgi is a wrapper that provides ASGI support for the Tartiflette Python GraphQL engine. It is ideal for serving a GraphQL API over HTTP, o

tartiflette 99 Dec 27, 2022
Django GraphQL To Do List Application

Django GraphQL Simple ToDo HOW TO RUN just run the following instructions: python -m venv venv pip install -r requirements.txt source venv/bin/activat

pedram shahsafi 1 Nov 13, 2021
Translate APIs described by OpenAPI Specifications (OAS) into GraphQL

OpenAPI-to-GraphQL Translate APIs described by OpenAPI Specifications (OAS) or Swagger into GraphQL. Getting started OpenAPI-to-GraphQL can be used in

International Business Machines 1.4k Dec 29, 2022