Cleaning up iMessage

These days you have unlimited possibilities in communicating with each other. From email, through instant- up to Facebook-messages. One of the big disadvantages of those services is the need for an internet connection. When you’re on the go, you sometimes won’t be able to have that and therefor won’t receive any of your Facebook- or GTalk-messages.

With iMessage, Apple took a pretty good shot on this issue. iMessage transmits short messages, similar to an instant messaging service, between iOS and Mac devices. If your iPhone should not have any internet connection at that moment, the communication partner notices this and falls back to regular SMS. By that, iMessage are being delivered in any case, whether you have an internet connection or not. Of course, there are some situations, in which this won’t work, for example, if a Mac user tries to send you an iMessage to your iPhone that has no internet connection. Due to the fact, that your Mac has no SIM and therefor no possibility of sending regular SMS, you will receive his iMessage *always* as iMessage – unless this Mac guy also owns an iPhone, which has iMessage activated. Then, the Mac will try to send the iMessage, notice that you can’t be reached that way and since the iMessage conversation is being synchronised all over your iMessage devices, the iPhone will re-transmit the Mac’s iMessage as regular SMS.

However, Apple’s iMessage is a very comfortable way for iOS/Mac owners to communicate with each others. I’m heavily using it on my own and I’m pretty happy with Apple’s service (at least, as long as their infrastructure won’t break down, like it did several times so far). What I didn’t like with iMessage is the missing possibility to chose, where iMessages should be redirected to. Let me explain:

The default behaviour of iMessage makes you receive any message directed to any contact address of yours (regardless whether it’s a phone number or an email address) on any devices you enabled iMessage on. So in my case, the iMessage communication looked like:

Someone sent me an iMessage to either my mobile phone number or my email address. Suddenly, my MacBook, my iPhone and my iPad alerted me regarding the new iMessage I’ve just received. That’s okay so far, since I could have been on any of those devices. But if the conversation continues for the next couple of minutes/hours, it starts getting pretty annoying to have *all* devices ring on any new iMessage. Of course, when you read a received iMessage on one device, it will be marked as read on any other as well. But still, the initial “ring” made me go crazy and my iPad and iPhone constantly losing battery, while I was sitting in front of my MacBook and leading the iMessage conversation there.

With GTalk for example, you also receive the initial message on each of your connected clients (e.g. iChat on your Mac and Verbs on your iPhone/iPad). But as soon as you answer the conversation from any of those clients, it continues *only* on that device. Message aren’t being sent to any other device, until GTalk notices that you haven’t answered the conversation for quite a long time or no conversation has been done within the last few minutes/hours. At that point, it initialises a new session, where the initial message is being received by any device again. And this whole session is additionally split up per contact. This means, that even if you have a running session with contact A on your MacBook, when contact B writes you for the first time, the message is being pushed to all of your devices, while your conversation with contact A still continues on the MacBook only. For contact be you can then choose individually, where you’d like to lead the conversation. Pretty great, isn’t it?

Unfortunately, Apple didn’t implement iMessage this way. But, Apple have you the tools to kind of get it working for yourself this way.

Here’s what I did, to get rid of the permanent “ringing” on any of my devices.

First of all, you need to clean up the Apple ID you’re using with iMessage. Remove all email addresses you don’t necessarily want to use with iMessage. Then, if you have the possibility, create for each of your devices a separate email address. For me, this looked like:

macbook@mariusmm.com
iphone@mariusmm.com
ipad@mariusmm.com

I registered those addresses with iMessage. Then, on any device, I’ve unchecked every email address I wouldn’t want to receive messages for. My mobile phone number on the other hand is active on each of my devices. Additionally, I’ve configured each device to answer from a specific address only. To make this more clear, here’s a view of my iMessage setup on each of my devices:

With this iMessage configuration I can avoid receiving messages on all my devices. Only when people send me an iMessage directly to my mobile phone number, each device will initially receive this message.

So, however, I hope I could give you a brief insight about the whole Apple iMessaging stuff and maybe give you an idea of how you could organise your account to make this great service a little less annoying.