How to search your Twitter Direct Messages instantly [Free — 2021]
Twitter Direct Messages can contain a treasure trove of information that’s useful to access when needed. For example, I sometimes use Twitter Direct Messages as a way of “bookmarking” links or recording important reminders.
Unfortunately, Twitter only allows searching the names of participants in direct messages and not the actual direct message content or text! Also, Twitter’s direct message search feature seem to include only recent direct messages.
Today we’ll walk you through how to search all your Twitter Direct Messages — including the participant names and the direct message text or content. — This method allows you to access all your direct messages, even if they were created several years ago.
For this, we will use Twitter Archive Eraser: a tool that allows users to search and delete thousands of their unwanted tweets in bulk. However, Twitter Archive Eraser can be used for many other Twitter related scenarios, like searching DMs, finding one’s best tweets etc.
Let’s get started!
Step 1: download your Twitter data archive
The first step is to get a recent copy of your Twitter data from https://twitter.com/settings/your_twitter_data (see this video for a step by step instructions on how to download your archive.)
Step 2: download Twitter Archive Eraser and load your archive
Head over to https://delete.tweets.tools/ and download Twitter Archive Eraser (for your platform, available for Mac and Windows). Start the application and log in. On the log in window, click on the “complimentary features” button and the confirmation dialog. You’ll now be presented with two new addition buttons, click “Delete Direct Messages” (you might be presented with another log in dialog again). Don’t worry, this will not delete any of your direct messages!
In the next step, click “Load archive” and select the Twitter archive zip file you have downloaded in step 1. Once loaded, click “select all” to load all your Direct Messages and click next.
Step 3: search all your Twitter Direct Messages
At this step, you’ll be presented with a window listing all your direct messages. If you do not have a license, you can simply click the “padlock” icon to use the app in preview mode. This will allow you to search all your direct messages in realtime for free!
Below is a walkthrough of the different options in the interface:
Advanced Direct Messages search
Out of the box, you can search all your direct messages by keyword, this includes the participant’s user names and the direct message content or text.
While this is already a huge improvement over the participants-only search that Twitter offers, you can do much more by using the advanced Regular Expressions search.
Here are a few advanced search operations; copy the expression without quotes, and anything between <> is the keyword you want to customize.
- DM with a specific keyword: “<keyword>”
- DM containing two keyword in order: “<keyword1>.*<keyword2>”
- User name, e.g. DM sender, mentioned user etc: “@<username>”
- DM conversation with a specific user: “\[@<username>\]”
- Direct message with multiple participants (more than one receiver): “\[@.+@.+\]”
- Multiple participants and a specific keyword in the conversation: “\[@.+@.+\].*<keyword>”
- DM containing a URL: “http”
And the possibilities are endless as long as you can express your search query with a regular expression.
