20 Tips For Getting the Most From Messages On a Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are some tips for getting the most from the Messages App on your Mac. 

The primary purpose of the Messages App is to allow you to communicate with other people. There are a variety of different tools and techniques in the Messages App to help you do that more effectively. I'm going to show you the Messages App here in macOS Tahoe 26 using Apple's iMessage System. A lot of these techniques won't work if you're conversing with somebody who is using SMS or RCS in a non-Apple device. 

So, let's say you get a simple message like this one here and you want to respond to it. Now you may be tempted to emphasize the words Very Much with capital letters. Just putting them in all caps. But I find it is real easy to forget you can use some Rich Text in a message. For instance, if you go to Format here you see you can easily Bold the text in a message, Command B works just like it does in any word processor. So you can do Command i for Italic, Command U for Underline. You can even choose Strike-through here in the Format Menu. So I can very easily make this text Bold just to give it a little emphasis or even Bold and Italic. 

Now if you want to go beyond that notice here under Format there are a bunch of Text Effects. So, for instance, if I wanted to use not here you can see I can just have it bounce up and down like that. You can also just Control Click, right click, or two-finger click on the selected text and select Text Effects from here. There's a whole bunch of different ones that you can use to give some words emphasis. Now you can also apply an effect to the entire message. As a matter of fact it is not just the in the message that will actually change how the entire Messages App looks for that person whether they are on a Mac, iPhone, or iPad. 

You click the Plus button here and you've got Message Effects. You can choose from a variety of things here. For instance I can have confetti fill their messages window. I can have the message itself slam into place or lasers emanate from it. Or just have it get really large, like that, and fall back. There are a whole bunch of different ones that you can use. Even ones that kind of play it down a little bit like this. So you can pick one of these and they will get the effect when they receive and then view the message. 

Now also notice here that there is some text underlined in the message they've sent to me. This isn't because they chose to underline it. It would have been a dark black underline if that was the case. It is because this is something I can now click on. The Messages App recognizes that this is talking about an event at a time and I can click on it like this. It will try to figure out what event to add to the Calendar. I can change which calendar to add it to. You can see it comes up with a title but I can edit that title. It puts it in this space here but I can change that. I can even go into details here and then I can really change tons of different things about this before using the Add To Calendar button. When I do add this to the calendar it adds it quietly. It doesn't launch the Calendar App to get in the way of what I was doing. 

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Now in addition to be able to send text you could also send Audio. I'm not talking about dictating. You can certainly use the dictation functions on your Mac to dictate text into the Messages field just like you can in Mail, or Pages, or anywhere else. But you can also click this button here and then you a record some audio. So you can speak or whatever you want. Put it here in the audio, press Stop, and you can click at the time here again to continue recording. Then you can send it to them. Then they'll get the audio recording and they can play it back on their end.

Another thing you can add to some text you are typing or just send by itself is an animated GIF. Now we're all used to seeing these in Messages and social media systems but it is really easy to add something here. Just click the Plus button and choose Images here. Then it is going to give you all of these images that you can easily just attach to a text message. You can search for them. You can search for birthday and get things related to that. Then you can just select that item and it adds it here in the message and then they see it animated on the other end. 

You also may notice a lot of other things here when you click the Plus button. For instance, a very new one is Polls. So this is a new feature in macOS Tahoe where you get to actually put different choices here and the person receiving it gets to select their choice. You write some regular text here and you normally wouldn't send this to one other person, although there are situations like this where you might. So here I've added a bunch here. I typed a message and I can send it and now the other person can actually choose from one of these places and doesn't have to respond to you. They can just click on it and then you would get to see their response. If you're in a Group Chat obviously this is more useful as an actual poll where you can then count up the votes. 

Now, an option you've got here is after you type a message instead of pressing Return to send it now, you can click the Plus button and choose Send Later. So you can choose now a date and time to send the message and it will get sent then. Especially handy if you know somebody is busy and you don't want to bother them now or you want a message to get to that person at a certain time when they are most likely to be able to take the action and respond to what you're asking. 

You don't have to respond with a message every time. But if you do feel you need some little bit of a response to it you can use a  Tapback. Where you do a Tapback is you Control Click, right click, or two-finger click on the message. It can be the last one you received or an earlier one. Then you can select one of the symbols here. Like a Thumbs Up for instance or you can click here to choose any emoji. Now, when you do that instead of it appearing as a new message below it just is going to appear as this little annotation to the actual message that was sent. They will see it the same way. 

Of course another thing you can do here is you can include photos. If you select that you can now view your Photo Library. You can search it. But notice here at the bottom it says Location Is Included. That's right. There's GPS location information in Photos. So when you send one to somebody they know where you were when you took that photo. This warning is good but how do you actually make it so that they don't get the location information. Well, you can't do that in Messages! You need to do it in Photos. If you launch Photos and you go to Photos, Settings then you go to General. Look for Sharing and there is a checkbox for include location information. Uncheck that and now when you go to include a photo you'll see here Location Not Included.  

Now whether it is a Group Chat or it is just another individual sometimes you want to respond to a message that was there earlier and it gets confusing if you just respond below because it seems like you're continuing a conversation. You can Control Click, right click, or two-finger click on any earlier message and then use Reply. Then this will allow you to respond with something and then you'll just see this message here and its response. If they were to respond to it you would see it underneath. It is kind of like a little sub-conversation inside the main one. If you go back to the main conversation here you'll see your reply below and it will show you what it is you were responding to. The other person will see the same. So it makes conversations a little more natural instead of getting confusing, especially if the other person asked you three things in a row and you want to respond to the first one. 

When you send a message like this and you realize there's an error in there, there's a mistake that you made, you may be tempted to actually send another message, you know like this, but you can actually just correct this message. Control Click, right click, or two-finger click on it and then choose Edit. Then you can go and change the message and then send it again. Note that it says edited underneath. You can click there and see the original message. They can see that too. So you can't really use it to kind of hide something that you sent that you shouldn't have. It's really more for just kind of correcting grammatical and spelling errors and things like that. So the conversation isn't cluttered with all sorts of corrections as new messages. 

Now let's talk about Group Chats for a minute here. So let's say you're in a Group Chat like this one and there are a lot of people sending a lot of messages and you're just getting tons of alerts. All these notifications are coming up all the time. You can silence those by clicking up here on the icon that represents the conversation. Which brings up the information here on the right showing you things about this conversation. Here you've got Hide Alerts. Turn that On and now you won't get all the new notifications for this conversation. You'll still be getting the messages. You'll just check them when you want and you won't be interrupted when new ones come in. Also, note that if you want to leave a Group Conversation like this, there's a button here for that. It's grayed out here because it requires that there be at least three other people besides you in the group that this will be read and you can click on it. 

Also there's a lot of functionality hidden behind clicking on the icon here to bring up the Sidebar. So, for instance, here if there had been any photos exchanged in this conversation you can click on Photos here and then it will show you them all. You can select one and actually drag it out to make it a file or move it to another app. Control click, right click, or two-finger click to view it larger or Save it to your Photos. You also might see other things. Like, for instance, Links from the conversation listed here, other documents and files that are also part of this conversation. You can easily grab these  and export them. Also if there are large attachments or large photos, videos, you can Control Click, right click, or two-finger click and Delete them so they are not taking up space on your Mac or in iCloud. 

When somebody sends you a message and it arrives on one of your devices that person will see Delivered underneath the message. As soon as you actually look at the message in the Messages App it will say Read. I know a lot of people like to go to Messages Settings and then under iMessage you can turn off Read Receipts. But you don't have to do that for everybody. You can do it for individuals. As long as you have it turned On there in Settings then you can go to the Info for this conversation and then scroll down and in addition to be able to Hide Alerts you will also be able to turn off Read Receipts for just that conversation.

Now another thing you can do here in the right Sidebar is you can Share Location with somebody else. You can request their location and then they can accept that or you can Share your location and both of those will then continue to update until you Revoke that by going here again. But you can also just send your current location as just a one time thing. 

Also here on the right side is Share Focus Status. So when you have that turned On if you've got Do Not Disturb turned on or some other Focus Mode they will see that and maybe know why it is you can't respond to them right now. For instance here back in this conversation this person is going to turn on Do Not Disturb mode and you can see that it comes on right there. If they turn that off it will go away. 

Now the standard way a lot of us use the Messages App on Mac is to simply have this one window, your list of conversations here on the left, and then the messages within that conversation on the right. But, you can also breakout the conversation into separate windows. Just double-click on a conversation and you can see now it breaks it out into a separate window, like this, and I can resize it, and position it, and put it somewhere else. If I want I can have another window here with this conversation and you can place them as you want. Leave them open. You can use all the windows switching techniques like Command and then the Backtick key to go between the windows and messages. Or Control and the Down Arrow to enter App Exposé and see all the windows for the current app, in this case Messages. Then select 1 to bring that one to the front. 

Messages now has some pretty powerful filtering built-in. If you go to Messages, Settings and then you go to General you'll see here first Unknown Senders and you can screen Unknown Senders. Then you can also filter likely Spam as well. So I've got both of those turned On. In order to see those messages when they come in I can just click on the Filter Button here and I can view my regular messages but I can also see the ones that have been filtered into Unknown Senders and the ones filtered into Spam. So if somebody sends you an important message and you don't see it, remember check in here to see if it has been filtered to one of these two categories. 

Here's a bonus tip: If you go back into Settings here, Messages is one of those apps that actually allows you to customize the Alert Sound on your Mac. Most apps just have the default notification sound. But here in the General Settings you've got Message Receive sound and you can set it to a whole bunch of different sounds here or you can set it to None. So it silently gives you the notifications. There are also a ton more useful settings here. There are other useful things you can do by clicking on the Plus Button. Some of these require Apple Intelligence. Others do not. There are a lot of features that you can find here in the Menus as well. 

So if you like some of these techniques you may want to explore more in Messages to see what other things are in there that you might find a use for. I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.