I handle legal discovery requests, which means I frequently use the Recording Bulk Export API to pull massive amounts of historical interaction data.
Lately, we’ve had requests involving Web Messaging sessions where customers uploaded images (e.g., photos of damaged products). The Bulk Export job pulls the JSON text transcript perfectly. However, the attachments are just represented as URLs. By the time our legal team clicks those URLs a week later, they get a 403 Forbidden because the AWS S3 pre-signed URLs have expired.
Is there a way to configure the Bulk Export API to download the actual media files alongside the JSON transcripts, rather than just returning the temporary links?
I run a local user group and this is a huge pain point for our enterprise members.
The short answer is: No, the native Bulk Export API does not package the physical attachments into the output zip file. It only exports the metadata (the JSON transcript).
To solve this, you have to build a middleware script. When the Bulk Export job finishes, your script needs to parse the resulting JSON files, look for the attachmentId or the media URLs, and immediately issue a GET /api/v2/conversations/messages/{conversationId}/messages/{messageId}/details to generate a fresh download URI, then fetch and save the file locally. You have to do this quickly before the URIs expire.
To add to 's point, if you are writing that script, be aware of the storage location!
Attachments in Web Messaging are stored in a different S3 bucket ecosystem than voice recordings. If your company uses the AWS KMS integration to manage your own encryption keys for recordings, that key does not automatically apply to messaging attachments. The URLs generated for attachments are tightly bound to the user context making the API call. Make sure your OAuth client used for the bulk export has the messaging:attachment:view permission, or your script will get a 403 immediately when trying to generate the fresh download links.