People

Use this page when you want to know more about one person: which chats you share, what they wrote to you or in your groups, and your own names and notes about them. You will learn how to read what the local store holds about a person, collect their messages for a summary, and keep private names and notes.

Some words on this page:

• The local store is the copy of your messages that wa keeps on this computer, filled by the phone's history push and by serve. Everything on this page comes from it, so it shows only what arrived.
• A person is named by their WhatsApp id or part of their name. WhatsApp names most people by a hidden id that ends in @lid (100000000000001@lid), not by their phone number. When part of a name matches more than one person, the command stops and lists them; run it again with the id.

The commands below add --offline where the command could otherwise ask WhatsApp: it keeps them on the store, so they never connect and work while serve runs.

What you can doCopy Anchor Link

Every option of these commands is in the command reference.

Who they are: contacts showCopy Anchor Link

wa personal contacts show 100000000000001@lid --offline
wa personal contacts show 100000000000001@lid --offline --with-notes --json

It answers the person as the store knows them, and the chats you share with them. --with-notes adds your private notes. The person is not told that you looked.

What they said: contacts contextCopy Anchor Link

Without --chat, it gives an overview from the store: the chats you share, the last message each way, their recent messages in your one-to-one chat and in groups, and where others mentioned them. It never connects.

wa personal contacts context 100000000000001@lid

With --chat, it gives their newest messages in each chat you name, oldest first, 20 per chat:

wa personal contacts context 100000000000001@lid --chat [email protected] --limit 10 --offline

• Each message is only its time and text, so an agent can read many of them at once. -v adds the message id, the sender and what it replies to; -vv gives the whole message.
• more: true means there are older messages than the limit; complete: false means the store does not hold the chat from its start, so the answer is a minimum. messages sync asks the phone for the older part (older history).

One person in two messengers: contacts linkCopy Anchor Link

WhatsApp, Telegram and MAX share one local store on this computer. When you know that a WhatsApp account and an account in another messenger are the same person, record it:

wa personal contacts link 100000000000001@lid max:"Example User"
wa personal contacts unlink 100000000000001@lid

After that, contacts context without --chat gathers both accounts. contacts context --chat still shows only the account you named. The link is only ever what you record: the same name in two messengers is never taken as the same person.

Your own names and notes: contacts aliases, contacts notesCopy Anchor Link

wa personal contacts aliases set 100000000000001@lid Ana    # your own name for a person, on this computer only
wa personal contacts aliases remove 100000000000001@lid
wa personal contacts notes add 100000000000001@lid --text-file note.txt  # or the text from stdin
wa personal contacts notes list 100000000000001@lid

contacts notes edit and contacts notes remove take the person, then the note's id, which notes list shows.

Aliases and notes stay in the local store and never reach WhatsApp or the person's phone. An alias applies only in the account you use now; a note about a person shows in every profile on this computer that sees them. A command finds a person by your alias unless it matches someone else's name; then it needs the id. --revision stops an edit of a note that changed since you read it.

Ask WhatsApp about a personCopy Anchor Link

These connect; while serve runs, they go through serve's connection.

wa personal contacts info 100000000000001@lid        # their name, about line and whether they show a photo
wa personal contacts block 100000000000001@lid
wa personal contacts unblock 100000000000001@lid
wa personal contacts lookup < number.txt                # whether this number has WhatsApp, and its id
wa personal contacts sync                                # the phone's address book into the local store

For contacts lookup, first write the number to number.txt, on one line, in international format.

• contacts info tells the person nothing. It shows no phone number.
• contacts lookup reads the number from stdin, never from the command line, and sends nothing to it. It takes one number, at most one every 10 seconds for the profile: many lookups in a row are what WhatsApp bans scrapers for.
• WhatsApp keeps your address book on the phone, so contacts add, remove, rename and import are refused.

Next stepCopy Anchor Link

To see what a whole group is doing, and who waits for an answer there, read groups. An AI agent can run all the commands on this page for you; to connect one, see the MCP server.