Kept Chats

About

About Kept Chats

A small, private reader for the history people saved when Skype closed.

Why it exists

When Skype closed in May 2025, Microsoft offered a download of each account's messages and files. The download is a .tar archive holding a messages.json file and a folder of media, which most people have no easy way to read. Many of those conversations are with family and friends, some of whom have since died. Kept Chats is meant to be a calm, private place to read them again.

How it works

Everything runs in your browser. The export is read from your disk in pieces, so large files work; messages are kept in memory only while the page is open; photos are read from the file when you scroll to them. Message text from the export is turned into a short list of safe pieces (text, links, quotes, emoticons, photos) before it is shown, so nothing in an export can run as code on this page.

How it was checked

The export format was worked out from Microsoft's own description of the download and from the source code of open-source tools that read it. The reader has been tested against exports generated to match that format, including conversations with 200,000 messages and deliberately hostile message text. If your export doesn't open or something looks wrong, the anonymous failure note tells us the kind of problem, never the content.

Who runs it

Kept Chats is made by ALGD LTD, a company registered in Northern Ireland (NI744090). It is not affiliated with Microsoft. You can reach us at [email protected].

Open-source software and licences

  • pdf-lib (MIT) and @pdf-lib/fontkit (MIT), used to make PDF copies.
  • sql.js (MIT), SQLite compiled to WebAssembly, used to read classic main.db files.
  • Fraunces and Source Sans 3 typefaces (SIL Open Font License 1.1), via Fontsource.
  • Liberation Sans and Liberation Serif (SIL Open Font License 1.1), embedded in PDF copies.
  • Format references, read as documentation (no code copied): Skyperious by Erki Suurjaak (MIT), SkypeExportArchiveToTextConverter by Roland Pihlakas (LGPL 2.1), and Microsoft's skype-parser viewer.

Full notices are in licences.txt.