I just upgraded my mac from 10.14 to 13.6.5. Now whenever I get a message, the notification that appears shows the person's phone number or email address rather than their name. My contacts are synced using iCloud, and the notifications work fine on my iPhone. It was working just fine in 10.14 too. Any ideas on how to fix this? Update: I tried to fix it by signing out of Messages and signing back in again... and now every single one of my iMessage conversations are gone! 😭 All of my SMS messages are still there.

On my iPhone running iOS 18, in iMessage, I have multiple sender addresses including 3 phone numbers and 3 email addresses. Different from https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/468103/how-to-use-different-sender-address-in-imessage-when-messaging-different-contact , where the OP wanted to use different sender addresses intentionally, I only want to know which address I am actually using in each existing conversation. Contacts are not all using the same default address to contact me, because I notice that iMessage will use the address that I received the message from to send responses. This starts to become an issue as I plan to remove one of these email addresses that I no longer want to use. I would like to know which contacts I need to send this update. Likely there are not many such contacts, so I don't want to send the update to everyone. Also, if I just remove it blindly and start to send messages using my new default address, then some contacts could spam my messages automatically because they don't have my new address in their Contacts.

I'm experiencing an issue on my MacBook Air (macOS 15.1) where I can't log into Messages or FaceTime. Whenever I try, I just get an endless spinning wheel. I've already tried the following troubleshooting steps without success: Resetting NVRAM Changing networks Logging in and out of iCloud Force quitting the apps Restarting my computer. Has anyone encountered this before or found a solution?

I currently am using iphone and ipad (iOS 17) and MacOS High Sierra and Monterey. On iOS, return adds a newline. A separate icon is used to send. On Mac OS, Return sends the message. You can get a newline with option-return. shift-return acts as return. Even the use of option-return is problematic. Many user interfaces (e.g. facebook, and reddit's web interfaces) allow the use of shift-return to add a line break without sending. Both of those interfaces treat option-return as a return. I would like the Mac behaviour to be like the iphone behaviour. I want to have to explicitly send the message. Since I use messages, reddit and facebook a lot on all three devices, I'd like a solution that does ONE of the following: * Defaults messages on Mac to use return as line break. Sending the message can be any key combination the developer desires. Command-Option-Shift-MetaCoffeecup-Down-arrow * Alternative MacOS app that can use Apple's Messages protocol. * Changes Messages on Mac to treat shift-return as line break. *** Research: This is a recurrent question on the Apple Help Community. There are several mentions of the Option-return workarouond, and some mention of shift-return. On this site, it comes up in this thread. It's only somewhat parallel as the problem is with a bluetooth keyboard on iPad. https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/412770/how-do-i-disable-message-sending-using-the-return-key-on-ipad-or-iphone-while-u/475798#475798

Please bare with me my english isnt to good. I am looking to read the chat.db file from another computer on mine. I coppied the whole message file from other computer. I deleted my messages folder and replaced it with the one from other computer. When i restart computer i dont get to see any of the messages. Any thoughts? If i cant do that way is there a easy program that i can load the chat.db file into and read like it was imessage or some thing simular. I tried using sqllite and was so lost my head spinning. I know a little about computers but nothing close to this. Any help greatly apreciated.

So, I recently experienced what seems to be quite an old bug in the default Messages app for the iPhone: while I was typing a text message, my phone’s battery died, and when the phone was powered back on, my text message history seemed to have been entirely deleted. However, there’s still the little number in a red bubble on the app’s icon indicating unread messages, which I don’t seem to be able to remove since I can’t read the deleted messages. Is there any way to recover the messages so that I can read them (other than using a cloud backup I haven’t made), or a way to reset the unread messages indicator to display the correct value for the messages it has access to?

I like that Messages uses text replacement to change :) into an emoji. However, I hate the default mappings. I want to change the emoji that is mapped to those text replacement strings. For example, :) currently gets replaced by 😊. But I would prefer to it be 🙂. Similarly, :( gets replaced by 😟, but I would prefer 🙁. Aside from creating my own text replacements in System preferences > Keyboard > Text, is there a way to change this? I don't want to enable a universal text replacement because I sometimes use text emoticons in applications that don't support emojis.

This is infuriating: I'll receive a message, notification pops up, I click on it, read it, then move on. Then some time later another notification for that same message will pop up again, again I'll head over to make sure that reading the message somehow "sticks" this time. Then some time later another notification pops up, etc. I tried restarting the Messages app but the problem persists. I've been receiving the same six notifications for the past two hours now...

I have an Apple Watch 10 no cellular connection. Most messages work with a notification on the watch and then I can read in Messages on my phone or Mac. However there are some messages that only appear as notifications on the watch and do not appear at all on the iPhone or any other device. How do I read these messages - and keep them as the notification just disappears on the watch? I think all these hidden and self deleting messages are SPAM.

So unbelievably I have *never* cleared my history in SMS/iMessages/Messages. Ostensibly, I should be able to scroll up and eventually see my first text message from my first gen iPhone. This is, unsurprisingly, taking up a considerable amount of space on my phone, but a big part of why I've never cleaned it out is that it contains a tremendous number of pictures of my daughters my wife has sent me over the years. It doesn't seem like these get saved to my photo roll and there doesn't appear to be any way to bulk export them. It may be worth noting that I use desktop messages in Yosemite and it seems work well, so there may be an approach I can use from that angle. What's the best way for me to archive all the photo attachments from almost seven years of text messages?

I am getting a new iPhone come next month. I want to save all of my nostalgic conversations for the future. Is there a way to transfer an entire chat log to the computer in plain text? Or will I have to painstakingly take screenshot after screenshot as I scroll up in the text history?

I deleted all my texts from my significant other by a mistake on my iPhone and I don't have it backed up by iCloud (my mistake). I have all the texts on my MacBook under Messages. Is there any way I can get them down to my Phone again?

I've been having this issue for a while now and even the newest iOS didn't seem to solve it: The problem is that sometimes I just won't receive calls and/or messages. I figured it happens completely random, but **in most cases it happens when the screen is locked** - that means, even if I am passively using phone - listening to music and if the screen is locked, I'd sometimes get missed messages/calls - **It doesn't ring, I don't get any alerts until after I wake up my phone**. Then I get the notification of a missed call or that of a message that was delivered x minutes ago. - **'Do not disturb' is off**, I've also talked to people who couldn't reach me because of this problem and they said the phone was just ringing until the call was eventually dropped. - I've sent the list of missed calls to my carrier in case the problem might be on their side, but they've been unable to find anything out of the ordinary. So I guess the problem must be with the device itself or with the software. - Resetting network settings also doesn't seem to help at all. - Notification preferences in Settings → Notifications → Phone are all good. See comment under answer below: https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/379272/313842 I really like this phone, but if it doesn't serve it's main purpose, what can I do with it?

I am trying to recover chats from WhatsApp on Mac, due to a problem with my iCloud backup. I have Time Machine backups and I am trying to find where WhatsApp stores my chats in my Library. I have looked at a previous question (Deleting WhatsApp chat history from work Mac ), but this was before WhatsApp no longer required a continuous internet connection. * Is it possible to extract my chat history from my Time Machine backup, i.e. does WhatsApp exclude chat history from Time Machine backups? * For future reference, where can I find the WhatsApp chat history, if possible, in my Library on my Mac?

I cant get texts on my Android phone from messages on my Macbook, but only from a few people. Coincidentally its people I've had facetime conversations with. It seems that the Mac has said to itself "these two people communicated in the Apple universe, lets keep it that way". Are there settings I need to change? I can send a text from my phone and they receive it, but when they respond it comes to my Messages app on my Macbook and not my phone.

Some time earlier this year I started getting my child's screen time requests in the Messages app. This has become really annoying. The whole thing seems half-baked and there are several issues: 1. Each request appears multiple times 2. The request, which goes to both my wife and me, shows up as coming from my child, but the request text says "Mama asked for more time". 3. I send my messages to my laptop as well, and there these messages all show a spinning fan while Messages loads more information, I guess. 4. It really locks up the Messages app. Sometimes it causes the app to crash. "Messages quit unexpectedly." I tried searching for ways to disable this but I didn't find any good answers on the Apple support site. I can't see actual messages from my kid for all these stupid screen time requests. Is there a way to disable this again?

In most single-line text edit fields, pressing ↑ moves the cursor to the start of the line, and pressing ↓ moves the cursor to the end. But in the Messages app, the behaviour is slightly different; it seems to consider 3 positions: the start of the line, something like the last location of the cursor, and the end of the line, and pressing ↑ / ↓ cycles through these (so e.g. pressing ↑ then ↓ returns the cursor to the same position). I can see some logic to this for people who press ↑ or ↓ accidentally and want a quick way back to their old place, but I find it jarring since I'm used to the standard home/end behaviour. Is there a way to configure it? I'm not sure if this is Messages-specific, or something more general (though I haven't seen any other apps show this behaviour). Demonstration of different behaviours (if the video doesn't play, click it to open in a new window; seems Imgur prevents looping gifs):

Both my iMac and MacBook pro no longer let me send messages from the messages app. It worked like a charm before and now I'm not allowed to. There's no "message forwarding" option anymore in messages, so what in the heck do I do? Help!

I'm texting another iPhone and think she has her imessage turned off and most of the time hasn't got wifi or data. I have imessage turned on as well as wifi/data. Some of my texts that go through to her, are just green. However, others are green but with 'imessage' text above and then 'sent as text message' below. Why is this? Does this only happen when the recipient has wifi but also has their imessage turned off?

With iCloud Backup, there are two ways data is stored: *Apps Using iCloud* and *Backups*. The *Backups* portion is the equivalent of a full backup performed iTunes. *Apps Using iCloud* is app data written to the cloud storage, but accessible by apps and services outside of restoring your phone from a backup. On iOS, it is possible to have your Photo Library backed up with the system backup while keeping iCloud Photo Library feature turned off. When browsing the system backup options, Photo Library appears as an option but Messages does not. This leads me to believe that Messages could be excluded from the system backup. If iCloud Messages as a service is turned off, are Messages data still included in the iCloud full **system** backup of the phone?