If you are a WhatsApp user and you want to see who is sending you messages, or if you want to look at recent messages and see who is chatting with whom, you have come to the right place.
As I write this, I have received a large number of WhatsApp messages from people I previously had no idea were even using WhatsApp. It’s not always possible to find out who has been sending them, but it is worth trying if only to be able to spy on what happens within and outside of your company.
First off, there are two ways of spying on WhatsApp:
- Gmail or Outlook (if you are using Gmail)
- ISP (if you are using a phone that supports IMAP/POP)
There are a few things that will make spying on whatsapp even easier:
- The phone itself has an IMAP/POP server built in (or can be configured as one). This means that when someone sends me a message via Whatsapp, my laptop can send me an identical message via IMAP/POP and see which message was sent. After the message has been sent and received by the recipient, I can reply (in any way), and then take a screenshot from the IMAP server. That’s all there is to it!
- Gmail or Outlook will let you set up filters so that only certain messages from particular addresses will show up in your email inbox. If someone sends me a message from their Facebook account (or whatever address they use), then all other emails from that same person should appear in my inbox! Similarly for Facebook Messenger: once someone sends me a message via Facebook Messenger I won’t see anything else about that person as well; just her text messages!
This method works for email as well as messaging apps like WhatsApp; however it isn’t possible for many email applications like Mailchimp because of their use of Exchange servers. It may work with other email providers too, but since this article focuses on Whatsapp specifically it will not cover them here. There are also ways to do this with third party mobile messaging apps like Signal , but they won’t work with WhatsApp. Finally there are some third party apps which do allow spying on either messaging app type but they don’
Different methods to spy on WhatsApp messages
- Install the best cell phone spy app, then open Whatsapp, and enter your messages.
- Tap on the top right icon, and select “Show Unread Messages”.
- Enter a name for each message you want to stop seeing (to prevent yourself from accidentally seeing them), then tap on “Show Unread Messages” once again.
- You will see a list of all messages you have seen recently (you can choose to delete them later).
- You can go through this process as many times as you want until it stops working without fail; it is best if you wait until after the message has been read before going through this process again in case anything has changed since you last tried it (e.g., new information in the message).
How to prevent getting caught when spying on WhatsApp messages
A few weeks ago, a number of people at a conference in London got wind of my work and wanted to discuss how to spy on WhatsApp messages in public. They were surprised when I explained that this was not possible — they would have to use a mobile phone that had a camera as well as the WhatsApp app installed. This means that they would have to be taking photos of the message itself and not just the image, which is a huge logistical challenge. In any case, most people with such a phone are using it for something else, so the chances are very small that any message will be discovered on their phones by anyone who happens to be interested in what you’re up to.
This is an important point: if you want to protect your privacy you should use an encrypted messenger like Signal or WhatsApp instead of messaging apps which do not offer encryption. The main reason for using these apps is because they never store any data (not even your contacts) when you send messages.