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eDiscovery

Export iPhone messages to RSMF

Text messages from an iPhone backup, delivered as RSMF 2.0 for Relativity and other review platforms that consume it: threading, participants, timestamps, reactions, edits, and attachments preserved, produced entirely on your own computer.

What RSMF is, in one paragraph

RSMF (Relativity Short Message Format) is the interchange format review platforms use to ingest chat and text-message data without flattening it. An .rsmf file is an EML wrapper carrying a plain-text transcript for extracted text, plus a structured manifest that keeps what makes messages messages: who said what, to whom, when, in which conversation, with which attachments and reactions. A PDF shows a conversation; RSMF lets a review platform treat it as data.

What Text2Store produces

  • RSMF version 2.0, including the 2.0 fields: custodian, direction, participants, and event collection metadata.
  • Participants with real names. The same contact resolution the app's own reader uses, with the raw handle (phone number or email) preserved as the platform identifier. Names are never invented; a handle with no contact card stays a handle.
  • Timestamps as ISO 8601, from the store's own values.
  • Reactions handled the way reviewers expect. Tapbacks are aggregated onto the message they react to, including iOS emoji tapbacks, instead of appearing as loose events.
  • Edits and deletions stay visible. An edited message carries an edit record; a message sitting in Recently Deleted exports with its deleted flag set and its content intact. The exporter records what the store records and fabricates nothing.
  • Attachments ride along inside the RSMF container, referenced by the manifest, original filenames preserved.
  • iMessage, SMS, and WhatsApp conversations from the same backup, each labeled with its platform.
  • Bulk export: one conversation, a selection, or every conversation in the archive, each as its own RSMF file.

Checked against Relativity's own validator

Every change to the exporter is tested against Relativity's official RSMF validator library, to the strict standard: warnings addressed, not just errors, because Relativity's guidance is that both should be resolved before ingest. That check runs against real exported files, not just fixtures.

Produced on your machine, which matters here

Text2Store reads the phone's backup locally and writes the RSMF locally. Message content is not uploaded to anyone, including us, which keeps the processing story short when someone asks where the data went. The source archives are content-addressed and integrity-checked on import, and archives can optionally be anchored with an RFC 3161 trusted timestamp at creation, which lets you show an archive existed in its exact form at a point in time.

How it works

  1. Get the messages onto the computer. Connect the iPhone and click Back Up & Archive, or import an existing backup or Text2Store archive. Encrypted backups are supported with the backup password.
  2. Pick the scope. One conversation, several, or the whole archive.
  3. Export as RSMF. Each conversation lands as a validated .rsmf ready to hand to processing.

Working in eDiscovery?

We are looking for a small number of legal teams and litigation-support professionals to work with directly on RSMF workflows: your real matters, our exporter, direct access to the developer, at no cost during the pilot. If your review vendor asks for RSMF and you have iPhone data, we would genuinely like to hear from you, including what would need to be true for this to fit your workflow.

hello@text2store.com with the subject "RSMF pilot".

Pricing

RSMF export is included in the full version of Text2Store today: a one-time purchase, no subscription, no per-export fees, no per-gigabyte processing charges. Backing up and browsing recent messages is free, so you can verify the data is all there before paying anything.

Honest limits

  • The exporter reads Apple's and WhatsApp's own on-device stores. Content a phone never held (messages deleted before the earliest backup you have) cannot be exported by anyone; Text2Store's merged archive view can reach back across every backup you kept.
  • Nothing on this page is legal advice, and validation against the RSMF specification is not a guarantee of admissibility. Your review workflow's requirements govern.

Background reading: getting iPhone text messages into Relativity, the RSMF route. Step-by-step product instructions live in the RSMF export help page.