In optical chaos communications a message is masked in the noise-like broadband output of a chaotic transmitter laser, and message recovery is enabled through the synchronization of the transmitter and the (chaotic) receiver laser. Key issues are to identify the laser operating conditions which provide the highest quality synchronization conditions and those which provide optimized message extraction. In general such operating conditions are not coincident. In this paper numerical simulations are performed with the aim of identifying a regime of operation where the highest quality synchronization and optimizing message extraction efficiency are achieved simultaneously. Use of such an operating regime will facilitate practical deployment of optical chaos communications systems without the need for re-adjustment of laser operating conditions in the field.