Here’s how to add and at least as importantly how to remove the background color of email messages in your message list in Apple Mail on your Mac. Let’s say that you want to color code the messages in your inbox or other mailbox on your Mac in Apple Mail, maybe red for email from your boss, yellow for aunt Sally, and green for your kid who’s away at college and always asking for money. Here’s how to do it, and how to undo it.

It has been the bane of Mac users’ existences ever since Big Sur: how to prevent Messages from opening a new chat window when you click on a new message that has arrived? Starting with Big Sur, double clicking, or even just newly clicking, on a new message in Messages (formerly iMessage) when transitioning from any other app causes the new message to be opened in a new window, rather than it just going to the message within the Messages list. This happens whether you have your trackpad set to “tap to click” or you have your trackpad set to require an actual physical click (well, even those aren’t actually physical, so we guess that we should say “actual simulated physical click”).

Frustrated that iMessage on the Mac doesn’t have the X to delete a message thread any more? Us too. Starting with Big Sur iMessage no longer has the X on which you used to be able to click to easily delete a message conversation. In fact, it’s pretty darned frustrating, and why Apple would remove that handy (and, let’s face it, very small and lightweight) feature is beyond us. However, there you have it.

If you’ve set up a new Macbook or Mac, or updated OS X, you may find yourself suddenly getting that frustrating “not delivered” error when you try to send a text message from your Mac to someone with an Android phone, even though it all worked just fine before. You’ve got it all set up correctly, and you’ve searched the Internet, followed all the advice, and tried all the tricks, and you are still getting that awful “not delivered” message whenever you try to send a message from your Mac to someone who uses an Android phone. Well, before you give up completely, keep reading.

Clubhouse has finally made direct private messaging available right on the app instead of having to go to IG, it’s called BACKCHANNEL. One of the biggest weaknesses of Clubhouse (the Clubhouse app) has been its complete lack of a way for users to privately message between themselves. With the July 14th update, Clubhouse now officially as a way to private message users without having to leave Clubhouse.

Did you know that you have three separate message inboxes on Facebook? And that Facebook only notifies you about messages in one of them?

It’s lovely getting all those birthday posts and birthday messages when Facebook tells your friends that it’s your birthday, but trying to keep up with them all, let alone manage and respond to them all, can be a bit overwhelming. Here’s how to make all of those Facebook birthday greetings manageable, including being able to respond to them all!

While ‘archive’ had always been an option previously, now the only options for dealing with a received message in the Facebook Messenger app are ‘Mark as Unread’, ‘Ignore Messages’, blocking the sender, or deleting the message. Ignoring the message is the closest message option to archiving it, however that moves the message to “Message Requests”, which is not at all what you want to do.

Let’s say you want to search all of the text messages that you have received on your Mac via Messages (formerly iChat), sent using Apple’s iMessage system, because you know someone sent you some information via chat messages, but you can’t remember who, or you can remember who but it was so long ago that scrolling back on your iPhone or in your Mac’s Messages chat window would take forever. Here are two methods to search all of your archived Mac messages at once.

Here’s a nifty, little known service offered by Amazon: text message (i.e. SMS) notifications of when an Amazon order is delivered to your door, as well as when an order has been shipped, when a refund has been posted to your account, etc.. In this day and age of so-called ‘porch pirates’ (people who follow the UPS truck and steal your packages as soon as they are delivered) this is proving to be a very useful service!

“iPhone text messages won’t stay deleted and keep coming back,” complains one user. “How can I permanently delete iMessage SMS messages?” asks another. It seems that no matter what you do to delete those text messages, they keep coming back! Here’s how to delete text messages and text message threads on your iPhone permanently, so that they don’t reappear.

Don’t you just hate it when you get included in a mass Facebook email message from someone on Facebook, and then lots of other people start replying, and you get all of those replies? When you find yourself swimming in Facebook message replies to a Facebook message thread that you never even requested, do you find yourself wondering how to unsubscribe to the message thread – how to stop Facebook messages – how to stop receiving all those replies? How to leave the conversation? Well, here’s how.

Don’t you just hate it when you type a text smiley face such as :-) and your chat program insists on turning your text emoticon into a graphic emoji? Here’s how to turn off emoji in the Mac instant messenger program Messages (formerly known as iChat and iMessage), so that it will instead send and display text-based smiley and other faces.

Automated vacation messages are often frowned upon for several reasons, including that they can be a spam vector, that if set improperly (such as being triggered with every single email from every single person) they can actually views as spam, and that they can actually cause legitimate email from you to end up in the spam folder. But as if that’s not enough of a reason to not use an automated vacation message, they can also be used with a bit of social engineering to steal your identity. Here’s how that can happen.

LinkedIn has ramped up their promotional message program – also known as sponsored messages (or as some call it, LinkedIn spam). Promotional messages, explains LinkedIn, are “from a marketing or hiring partner and was sent to you based on your browsing activity or non-personal information such as job title, primary industry, or region.” Here’s how to make it stop.