Hey @marko​, Magnus from Intercom here!

Messages are how you reach out to contacts in Intercom. They are created when an admin sends an outbound message to a contact.

Conversations are how you can communicate with users in Intercom. They are created when a contact replies to an outbound message, or when one admin directly sends a message to a single contact.

Worth noting that from version 2.4 and up, our REST API allows you to create conversations from Messages automatically. See the "Create a message endpoint" for more details.

As for the export endpoint, it includes all outbound content types such as Posts, Custom Bots, Emails, Surveys and more. It does not contain any conversations, but it may contain Messages that were later replied to and became conversations.

If you want to view chats between an end-user and admin, you should look at retrieving specific users conversations instead of Messages. You can search for all conversations for a specific user by using our Conversation search endpoint, here. Use the "contact_ids" property and set it to equal to the end-users Intercom id when you search.

As for Python libraries handling gzip, I'm afraid I can't provide much guidance. If you run into a specific error indicating there's something weird with our zipped data, please reach out to us through the Messenger with more details.

I also have to note that any endpoint that is used in the unstable version is subject to change, and should not be treated as a stable endpoint!