macOS High Sierra: The Missing Manual

Chapter 20. Messages

Somewhere between email and the telephone lies the joyous communication tool called instant messaging. Plenty of IM programs run on the Mac, but macOS comes with its very own instant messenger program called Messages. (It used to be called iChat.) It’s built right into the system and ready to connect to your friends on the iCloud or Jabber networks.

Note

Messages, in macOS High Sierra, no longer works with the Yahoo or AIM networks—because those networks have been shut down.

This chapter covers how to use Messages to communicate by video, audio, and text with your online pals.

Welcome to Messages

Messages does eight things very well:

• Instant messaging. Instant messaging combines the privacy of email and the immediacy of the phone. You type messages in a chat window, and your friends type back to you in real time.

  You can keep your text messages, too. They’re not locked onto your phone, like regular text messages, and they don’t scroll away forever, like regular text messages. You can archive them, search them, copy and paste them, print them, forward them, and so on.

• Unified chat/text messages with phones (iMessages). This is huge. If you and your conversation partner both have iCloud accounts, then you both can move freely from phone to tablet to Mac. Your conversation appears in real time on all your gadgets simultaneously. If you started texting someone on the train home, you can sit down at your Mac and open Messages—and pick up right where you left ...