Access Facebook Messenger Messages

Question

For an application I've been working on I require access hopefully be able to send / receive Facebook Messenger messages through the API.

The other posts regarding this question on stack overflow are somewhat outdated now due to the updates.

After doing some research I found that it is indeed possible to send and receive messages as a bot, however I have been unable to find a working method to send and receive messages as a regular user.

I was able to find this API reference: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/v3.1/user/inbox which didn't appear to depreccated until I went ahead and tried it:

{
  "error": {
    "message": "(#12) This endpoint is deprecated for versions v2.4 and higher",
    "type": "OAuthException",
    "code": 12,
    "fbtrace_id": "xxxxxxx"
  }
}

It appears though facebook shut a bunch of stuff down after the privacy incidents in the previous months.

I am just wondering if there is any way to essentially manage the messenger account AS a user from an API externally?

Answer 1

There is no way to access the user messages, you cannot create messages and you cannot read the messages. There is no permission and no API for it anymore. It has been removed some years ago, it's not related to the recent changes.