iPhone Message Settings

This month we delve deep into Message settings (touch Settings, then Messages) to see what they mean and why you’re getting text messages on your Mac or iPad too.

At the top you’ll see iMessage (a.). This is Apple’s implementation of text messaging. If this is on and you send a text message to another Apple device user the message will be blue and won’t count against your text messaging plan (SMS texting). The next item (b.) is the one I get asked about most. If you have multiple Apple devices (iPad, Mac, etc.) and they all use the same iCloud account, then you can use those other devices for sending and receiving text messages. In my screen shot above, the “1 Device” is my Mac. This way if I get a text and I’m not near my iPhone I can see it and respond to the message.

Send Read Receipts (c.) is what you’d expect. The sender of the message will see you read their message. Send as SMS (d.) will send text messages as SMS (seen as green) messages if there is a problem with iMessage. This will use your text messages phone plan, but may be necessary at times.

As we scroll down: Send & Receive (a.) displays the phone number or Apple ID you can send and receive iMessages from. If you have an iPhone, your cellular number will be listed. If you have an iPod touch or iPad, then chances are good your Apple ID (which is an email address) will be listed. However if you have both an Apple ID and a phone number, you’ll see them all listed when you touch Send & Receive. This part is where sharing an Apple ID among family members can get tricky. You may get text messages sent to your spouse or kids if you all share a single Apple ID. To temporarily stop the other people’s messages, touch Send & Receive and uncheck all of the Apple ID’s that are not yours.

The next section dealing with SMS/MMS (b.) is for multimedia media messages, and you can control group messaging from here. Show Subject Field allows you to add a Subject line to a text, like an email. Character Count will count the number of characters as you type a text message. Blocked will show you any blocked recipients (spam texts) phone numbers you blocked.

Have messages going back years? These old messages can really clog up the works by causing some iPhone slowdowns and use up precious storage space. You can automatically remove old messages based on date from Keep Messages (c.). Touch it and you’ll have the choice to keep text messages for 30 days, 1 year, or forever.

The last part of Messages settings starts with Filter Unknown Senders (a.). This will sort text messages from people not in your Contacts to a separate list. The last two items deal with Audio Messages (b.) and Video Messages (c.) and how long you’d like them to stay on your iPhone. This screen shot shows that after 2 minutes a video or audio message I receive will expire or be deleted. You can adjust this setting from here or save the audio or video on a as wanted basis.