Google Messages is messaging developed by Google for Android devices. It enables users to chat, and send MMSs and SMSs.The app has great features that are coming in handy for enhancing interactions with family and friends as the pandemic continues to bite. Here are 5 cool Google Messages features that…

If you receive a text message that appears to be from AT&T, telling you that you had an unsuccessful payment, and to call 422850125, don’t respond!

If you get a text message supposedly from Wells Fargo, saying that your account has been temporarily locked for security reason, DO NOT click on the link! The message may come from 1410100007 or it may come from another number, it doesn’t matter. Again, do NOT click on the link.

The USPS (the U.S. Postal Service or, as most people refer to it, simply, ‘the post office’) Informed Delivery service is now in full swing. Announced earlier this year, with the Informed Delivery service you can sign up with the post office to have scans and notifications of your mail sent to you via email and text message, including first class envelopes and packages that are on their way to you.

If you received a text message or email telling you that “Account might be blocked for your security!” DON’T click on any link or respond to it! The spam message comes from text-pp.com-servicesupport@lsg.org, which should be a tip-off, but in case you’re not sure, it’s a scam!

“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.

A brand new SMS text message scam has hit smartphones. Coming from prvs=1846e0b0b3=kross@bloodsystems.org, it is an image of text, which reads “CONFIDENTIAL Mrs Thorens has assigned a rewarding charity project worth $2.5 Million USD to you. For full details, please contact her only at her private email address below.” The sample that we saw had an email address of mav22@rogers.com, although it’s quite likely that as that email address gets shut down, the scammers will swap in a different email address.

Wired’s Joseph Cox has a brilliant idea: what is the best, most readily available consumer device to use to make completely secure calls, and to use for secure text messages and secure chat? (Well, at least as secure and locked down as the average consumer can easily make them?) An iPod Touch! Brilliant! Here’s why.

If you find that iMessage is suddenly not working, and sending all messages as SMS text messages only, or if text message forwarding is no longer working on your iPhone and you are getting no code on your Mac or iPad to set it back up, try this.

Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Key Bank are among bank accounts being phished, SMiShed and vished by scammers who are sending SMS text messages to users, directing them to call hijacked Holiday Inn Express phone numbers which the scammers have disguised to make them sound like automated banking systems. So far this current crop has happened primarily in the Houston area.

Getting SMS text messages on your Mac or iPad may just be the holy grail for many Macbook and iMac users, but until now iMessage has not worked with messages sent from Android phones. If the person with whom you are messaging has an iPhone, then you can message them from your Mac with iMessage, but that has not been the case for texting with Android and other non-iOS phones.

So you’ve set up 2-factor authentication at all of the places we’ve recommended, and now you can’t figure out how to get Facebook to send you the authorization security code text message to your mobile phone so that you can log into your Facebook account. Here’s where you need to find it.

We’ve all received them. Those spam SMS messages that tell you that “Your entry in our drawing WON you a FREE $1,000 Target Giftcard! Enter ‘312’ at www.target.com.tgrz.biz to claim it and we can ship it to you immediately!”, or something similar about a Walmart or Best Buy gift card. Now the scum behind that text message spam, Daniel Pessin and Jacob Engel, along with their shell company Rentbro, have been taken down by the Federal Communciations Commission (‘FCC’).

Oh how we have longed for this day! After we made the switch to the iPhone, after being staunch Android fans for so long, the thing that we missed most about Android was apps like SMS Backup, which automatically forward your text messages to your Gmail account. This means that if you are at your computer, and not by your phone, you still get your text messages. It also means that you can maintain an archive of your text messages, if you like. This function has not existed in any app for the iPhone, and in fact we tried having it developed on our own, and ran into obstacles at every turn (mostly restrictions by Apple). But now, at last, we have our beloved SMS backup to Gmail function back, on our iPhone, and we are very happy campers.

Ok, now this is really cool. You can now get notices of new articles which show up at your favorite websites sent to your cell phone via SMS text message, as part of Yahoo’s free “RSS by SMS” alert service.