How to see the first message in a chat without scrolling (iMessage, WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram)

WhatsApp and Telegram can take you to the first message without scrolling: both have a calendar in the chat’s search that jumps to any date, so you pick one from around when the chat began. iMessage and Instagram have no jump at all. In Messages, search for a word you remember from the first days (on a Mac you can look up the first message itself), and for Instagram, download your messages and open the file in a free analyzer that shows the date the conversation started.

This guide gives the fastest route for each app, on your phone and on a Mac, plus what to do when a linked device doesn’t have your full history. We checked every step against WhatsApp’s, Telegram’s, Instagram’s and Apple’s own help pages, and Telegram’s app source code, on 20 October 2026. Menu names can differ slightly between app versions.

First message: the fastest way in each app (checked October 2026)

App	Jump to a date?	Fastest way to the first message	On a Mac
WhatsApp on iPhone or Android	Yes, search by date	Chat search, calendar icon, pick an early date	Use WhatsApp Web (next row)
WhatsApp Web	Yes	Chat search, calendar icon, pick a date	Works in any browser, but a linked device may not have your oldest messages
WhatsApp for Mac (app)	Not described by WhatsApp	Use your phone or WhatsApp Web	The app holds up to three years of history
Telegram	Yes, a calendar in chat search	Pick a very old date	Telegram Desktop’s calendar can jump to the start with a long press
iMessage (iPhone and Mac)	No	Search for a word from the first days	One read-only Terminal command shows the first messages and their date
Instagram	No	Download your messages as JSON	The analyzer shows the conversation’s first date

WhatsApp: search by date

WhatsApp’s phone apps have a calendar inside each chat’s search that jumps straight to a date (WhatsApp Help Center). Pick a date from around when you started talking and you land within a short scroll of the first message.

On iPhone

1. Open the chat and tap the contact’s or group’s name at the top.
2. Tap Search, then tap the calendar icon.
3. Pick the date, then tap Jump to date.

On Android

1. Open the chat, tap the menu (⋮), then Search.
2. Tap the calendar icon.
3. Pick the date and tap OK.

If you don’t know when the chat began, jump to your best guess and check the date bubbles: if you’re still mid-conversation, jump again to an earlier month.

On a Mac

WhatsApp Web has the same date search: open the chat, click the search icon, then the calendar icon, and pick a date. WhatsApp’s help page describes date search on iPhone, Android and the web, but not in the WhatsApp app for Mac, so if you don’t see a calendar there, use keyword search, WhatsApp Web or your phone.

There’s a second catch. Your Mac is a linked device, and linked devices don’t get your whole history: WhatsApp says the Mac app can “access up to three years of message history” (WhatsApp), and its linked-devices page currently mentions a known issue with some linked devices not showing up to a year of history (WhatsApp). For a chat older than that, the first message may exist only on your phone.

Read the whole chat from the start

To read a chat from its first message on a big screen, export it from your phone and open it in a viewer:

1. On iPhone, open the chat, tap the contact’s or group’s name, then Export chat, and choose Without media (WhatsApp Help Center). On Android, open the chat, then ⋮ → More → Export chat.
2. Save the .zip to Files or send it to yourself.
3. Open it in our free WhatsApp chat viewer. It shows the chat as bubbles starting with the first message in the export, with search, and Save as PDF if you want a copy. Photos and other media show as placeholders.

The file is read in your browser and never uploaded. If you only want the date, the chat analyzer shows the export’s date range (first and last message) at the top of its summary. Both tools are confirmed with exports from the iPhone and Android apps.

Telegram: the calendar in chat search

Telegram has had a jump-to-date calendar since 2016: “tap Search inside a chat and choose a day using the Calendar tool” (Telegram). There’s no “go to first message” button, but when someone asked for one on Telegram’s Bugs and Suggestions site in 2023, an admin replied that you can “pick a very old date from the search calendar” (Telegram Bugs and Suggestions).

1. Open the chat and open its search.
2. Tap or click the calendar icon.
3. Pick the earliest date you can, and Telegram opens the chat there.

In the phone apps you can also tap the date bar that appears as you scroll to open the calendar (Telegram).

On a Mac: Telegram makes two official Mac apps, Telegram for macOS and Telegram Desktop (our Telegram on Mac guide explains the difference). In Telegram Desktop, the calendar carries a tip, “Press and hold to jump to the start”, which takes you to the earliest month in one move (Telegram Desktop source). Telegram doesn’t document where the calendar sits in the native Telegram for macOS app; if you can’t find it, type a date into the chat’s search instead. Telegram’s search accepts dates such as “August 14” (Telegram).

To read a whole Telegram chat from the start, export it from Telegram Desktop as JSON and open result.json in the free Telegram chat viewer, which shows it as bubbles with search and Save as PDF; the Telegram chat analyzer shows the date range. Our guide to exporting chats on a Mac has the steps.

iMessage: no jump, but two workarounds

Messages has no jump-to-top button and no date filter on iPhone or Mac. Apple’s Messages guide for macOS 27 describes search by words, people and content types but no dates, and its list of keyboard shortcuts has nothing that goes to the start of a conversation (Apple). So you search, or you look the first message up.

Search for a word from the first days

On a Mac, click the search field at the top of the Messages sidebar (or press ⌘F), type a word or phrase, and pick a result. Apple says “the conversation’s transcript opens at the location of the search result” (Apple), so you only scroll the last little bit. On iPhone, use the search field at the top of your conversation list.

Words that tend to appear only at the start of a conversation:

• “nice to meet you”, “it was great meeting you”
• “is this…?”, “it’s [your name] from…”
• “saved your number”, “here’s my number”
• the place or event where you met, or the app you met on

If the first messages are older than the history on your device, search won’t find them. On a Mac, make sure Enable Messages in iCloud is on in Messages → Settings → iMessage and that older messages have finished downloading (Apple).

On a Mac: look up the first message itself

Your Mac keeps your Messages history in a database file, chat.db, and macOS’s built-in sqlite3 tool can read it. One read-only command shows the first five messages of a conversation with their date and who sent them. You then search Messages for a word from them and jump straight there.

1. Give Terminal Full Disk Access: open System Settings → Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access, click +, choose Applications → Utilities → Terminal, then quit and reopen Terminal. The file is protected, and without this you get “authorization denied”. Our guide to Full Disk Access explains what the permission covers.
2. Paste this into Terminal as one line, replacing 5551234567 with the last digits of their phone number, their email address, or a group’s name:

sqlite3 -readonly -header -column ~/Library/Messages/chat.db "SELECT datetime(m.date/1000000000 + 978307200, 'unixepoch', 'localtime') AS sent, CASE m.is_from_me WHEN 1 THEN 'me' ELSE 'them' END AS sender, m.text FROM chat c JOIN chat_message_join cmj ON cmj.chat_id = c.ROWID JOIN message m ON m.ROWID = cmj.message_id WHERE (c.chat_identifier LIKE '%5551234567%' OR c.display_name LIKE '%5551234567%') AND m.item_type = 0 AND COALESCE(m.associated_message_type, 0) < 1000 ORDER BY m.date ASC LIMIT 5;"

3. Read the result: the date and time of each message, whether you or they sent it, and the text. The -readonly flag means nothing in your history can change, and the command skips Tapbacks and group notices.
4. Search Messages for a distinctive word from one of those first messages, and click the result.
5. When you’re done, switch Terminal off again in Full Disk Access.

A few things to know. If the text column is blank for a row, that message’s words are stored in a format this simple command doesn’t read; the date is still right. If someone has texted you from both a phone number and an email address, Messages may keep two conversations, so try both. And if you don’t know how a contact appears in the database, our guide to seeing who you text the most has a command that lists your conversations.

Instagram: no jump, so use your data download

Instagram has no date search or jump for DMs, on the app or on instagram.com. The reliable way to see how a conversation started is Instagram’s own data export:

1. At instagram.com, click More in the bottom left, then Settings → Accounts Center → Your information and permissions (Instagram is moving some people to Meta Account settings, so you may see that name instead of Accounts Center) (Instagram Help Center).
2. Click Export your information → Create export, choose your Instagram profile, click Next, then Export to device.
3. Choose only messages, set the date range to cover the whole conversation, set the format to JSON, and click Start export. Instagram says the email with the link can take up to 30 days, and you then have 4 days to download it.
4. When the download arrives, drop the whole .zip into the Instagram chat analyzer. It lists every conversation in the file; open one and the summary shows its date range, starting with the day of the first message. To read the conversation itself from the top, open the same file in the Instagram chat viewer, which also has Save as PDF.

Both tools read the file in your browser and upload nothing. They can’t read Instagram’s HTML export, so pick JSON.

Seeing the start of every chat in one place

If what you really want is to find old messages across apps, searching each one separately gets tedious. Tera Chat for Mac, a free app made by the team behind this blog, brings iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram and Tinder into one inbox and adds your messages to macOS Spotlight, so one search covers all of them. It isn’t a jump-to-date tool, and it only has the history each app gives it (for WhatsApp, what your phone sends to a linked device). It needs a Mac with Apple silicon and macOS 15 or later, and reading iMessage needs Full Disk Access. For the wider picture, see the best messaging apps for Mac and how to combine WhatsApp, iMessage, Telegram and Instagram in one Mac app.

Quick recap

• WhatsApp: chat search, calendar icon, early date. Use your phone for chats older than three years.
• Telegram: calendar in chat search, pick a very old date (Telegram Desktop: press and hold to jump to the start).
• iMessage: search for a word from the first days; on a Mac, look up the first message with one read-only command, then search for a word from it.
• Instagram: export your messages as JSON and open them in the analyzer for the first date.