# Reported issues for WhatsApp Connect

Pod holds 6 of 6 problems reported by people outside the maintainer team. Issues filed by the project's own owners, members and collaborators are excluded entirely — a maintainer's release checklist is not a warning to a prospective user.

Back to [WhatsApp Connect](/mcp/whatsapp-connect).

## Most discussed

### Dashboard: live chat updates, profile pictures, and document download/preview

Three gaps from real daily use of the dashboard's chat screen (v0.3.1):

## 1. Refreshing the chat screen (decided: a refresh button, not background real-time)

A chat that is open shows nothing new until it is re-opened. Decision: no background streaming — a **refresh control** loads what's new on demand, which fits the operator-console character and keeps the page quiet:

- A refresh button on the messages pane (and one for the chat list); clicking fetches only messages newer than the newest a

[Read the thread](https://github.com/Idle-Sync/whatsapp-connect-mcp/issues/19) · 2026-08-24 · closed · outside contributor · 0 comments

### Captioned documents decode as media-less kind 'other' — DocumentWithCaptionMessage wrapper is not unwrapped

## Summary

A document sent **with a caption** is stored as kind `other` with no text, no filename, and no media reference — `download_media` on it fails with `message media: message has no media`. A document sent without a caption stores correctly as kind `document`.

## Cause

`decodeMessage` (`internal/bridge/events.go`) matches `msg.GetDocumentMessage()`, but WhatsApp wraps a captioned document in a `DocumentWithCaptionMessage` container: the real `DocumentMessage` lives at `msg.GetDocumentW

[Read the thread](https://github.com/Idle-Sync/whatsapp-connect-mcp/issues/10) · 2026-08-18 · closed · outside contributor · 1 comment

### Message ingestion silently stalls while doctor reports healthy; reconnect leaves two processes sharing the same SQLite data dir

## Summary

Message ingestion silently stopped writing to `messages.db` while `doctor` kept reporting the session as healthy, and a client reconnect later spawned a **second** server process alongside the orphaned first one, both sharing the same SQLite files. The missed messages are permanently absent from the local mirror because WhatsApp does not redeliver events that were already delivered to the (still-"online") linked session.

Observed on Windows 10 (10.0.19045), local dev build at `87b5a

[Read the thread](https://github.com/Idle-Sync/whatsapp-connect-mcp/issues/9) · 2026-08-18 · closed · outside contributor · 3 comments

### Feature ideas: scheduled sends + inbound-message events

Two feature ideas, both aimed at using the server from autonomous / long-running agents.

## 1. Scheduled sends ("send on timer")

Send a message or media at a future time, or after a delay, instead of immediately.

**Sketch:**
- Either an optional `send_at` (RFC 3339) / `delay` param on the existing send tools, or a dedicated `schedule_send` + `list_scheduled` + `cancel_scheduled` trio.
- **The gate still applies at fire time.** An untrusted recipient must not become a way to fire unattended se

[Read the thread](https://github.com/Idle-Sync/whatsapp-connect-mcp/issues/3) · 2026-08-18 · closed · outside contributor · 3 comments

### list_messages: handle time server-side instead of raw Unix seconds + agent translation

## Problem

`list_messages` (and any other time-bounded tool) takes `after` / `before` as **raw Unix seconds**. To answer an ordinary request like "today's messages" or "yesterday's messages", the agent has to:

1. Know the user's timezone (guessed from context — here, IST for a Kolkata group).
2. Compute the local day boundaries.
3. Convert those to Unix epoch — in practice by shelling out to `date -u -d '...' +%s`.

That is brittle and a poor agent experience:

- **The agent hand-translates ti

[Read the thread](https://github.com/Idle-Sync/whatsapp-connect-mcp/issues/2) · 2026-08-18 · closed · outside contributor · 1 comment

### Backlog: capabilities to add

Capability backlog, worked through end-to-end. **All eleven items are now shipped or consciously scoped out**, each with tests; the table below is the current status rather than a to-do list. Two sub-features are deferred (their own scope), and a second round of improvements — surfaced by actually using the server — is tracked in separate issues (see the bottom).

## Status

| # | Capability | Shipped as | Status | Commit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | On-demand history backfill | `fetch_older_me

[Read the thread](https://github.com/Idle-Sync/whatsapp-connect-mcp/issues/1) · 2026-08-18 · closed · outside contributor · 7 comments

## Most recent

The remaining reports are on [the project's issue tracker](https://github.com/idle-sync/whatsapp-connect-mcp/issues).