Click on the Apple icon from the top Menu-bar of on your Mac and then click on the System Preferences option in the drop-down menu. On the System Preferences screen, click on Notifications. You can turn notifications off for all conversations or for just a single conversation. You can also turn off the ability to preview messages in your notifications.
- How To Turn Off Notifications On Pc
- How To Turn Off Notifications Windows 10
- Turn Off Notifications For One App Mac Youtube
Apple’s iMessage service is a brilliant and excellent way of keeping in touch with other Apple device users without incurring additional charges from your network provider. One of its most useful features is the ability to send and receive messages from any device connected to your iCloud account, including your Mac.
Sometimes, however, it can be a little bit too much. If you’re in an office with your iPhone, iPad and Mac and all of of them alert you to an incoming message, with a slight delay between them, the sound of all those alerts can be, well, let’s say a distraction.
How to delete an iMessage conversation
Messages is an Apple app that’s installed as a part of macOS, so you can’t simply delete it. You can, however, delete individual messages and attachments. The easiest way to do that is to use CleanMyMac X’s Privacy tool, which allows you to specify which conversations and attachments you want to remove and then delete them all in a click.
Tip: if you need to delete or uninstall other, non-Apple apps, don’t just drag them to the trash — they’ll leave lots of files behind on you hard drive. It’s best to use a dedicated uninstaller tool, like CleanMyMac X. You can download CleanMyMac and try it out for free here.
Fortunately, you can turn iMessage off on your Mac either permanently, or just for a little while so you can get some work done.
How to deactivate iMessage
- Launch the Messages app on your Mac.
- In the Messages menu, click Preferences.
- In the left hand pane, click on the account you want to turn off.
- Uncheck the box next to Enable this account.
That will stop you receiving messages from showing on your Mac and means that if you want to turn them back on again, all you have to do is check that box.
Alternatively, if you want to turn them off permanently, you can sign out of your iCloud account in Messages altogether. This will only affect the Messages app and won’t stop you, for example, using iCloud Drive or Photos with iCloud. Effectively, it deregisters iMessage from your account.
How To Turn Off Notifications On Pc
How to sign out of iCloud in Messages
- Launch Messages.
- Click Preferences in the Messages menu.
- Choose the account you want to sign out of in the left hand window.
- Press Sign out next to your Apple ID.
- In the pop-up window that appears, confirm by clicking Sign Out.
If you sign out and later decide that you want to use Messages on your Mac after all, you can add your account by going to Messages > Preferences and clicking the ‘+’ at the bottom of the Accounts pane, then type in your Apple ID and password. If you have two-factor authentication turned on, you may need to type in the passcode sent to your trusted device.
There is another option, if you want to be able to send messages from your Mac but don’t want notifications.
How to turn off notifications
- Click on the Apple menu and choose System Preferences.
- Choose the Notifications pane.
- Click on Messages in the left hand sidebar.
- Click ‘None’ and uncheck all the tick boxes.
Now, you’ll still be able to send and receive messages, but won’t be pestered by annoying alerts.
If you want to disable iMessage on your Mac because you’re selling it or giving it away, you’ll need to sign out of iCloud altogether, in addition to signing out of Messages.
- Click on the Apple menu and choose System Preferences.
- Click on iCloud.
- At the bottom left hand corner of the window, click Sign Out.
How to fix Messages when it’s not working properly
If the reason you want to de-activate iMessage and stop messages showing on your Mac is that it’s not working properly or that they’re not syncing properly on your iPhone, or iPad, there are a few things you can try.
- Turn off iMessage using the steps above, then turn it back on again.
- Sign out of Messages, using the steps described earlier, then sign back in again.
- Make sure you’re using the same phone number on your Mac as on your iPhone.
- Make sure the email addresses you’ve enabled in Messages on the Mac are those associated with your Apple ID.
- If you have more than one Apple ID, make sure you’re signed into the same one on Messages on all your devices.
If Messages from your friends aren’t displaying their name or photograph correctly, go to the Contacts app in your Applications folder and search for their name. Check that the entry has the phone number or email address they’re using for Messages. If not, add it.
It may be the case that you want to block specific people from contacting you via Messages, rather than switch it off altogether. Here’s how to do that:
- If the person or company you want to block isn’t already in your Contacts, go to the Contacts app in the Applications folder. If they are already in your Contacts app, skip to step 3 (you’ll know if they are, because Messages will display their name instead of just a phone number or email address)
- Click ‘+’ and New Contact then fill in the details on the contact card. Remember to include the phone number or email address they’ve been messaging you from.
- Launch Messages and choose Preferences from the Messages menu.
- Click on the Account you use for iMessage.
- Click the Blocked tab.
- Click ‘+’ at the bottom of the window. You’ll see a window slide down that has your Contacts in it. Start typing the name of the contact you want to block into the search box.
- Click on the name when it appears.
- You will now see that all their phone numbers and email addresses have been added to your blocked list.
As you can see, while you can’t uninstall Messages on your Mac, it’s easy to turn it off or disable it. Alternatively, you can just turn off notifications so it carries on working but doesn’t disturb you. If you need to delete the messaging history and all the attachments, you can do that too, using a dedicated app like CleanMyMac X.
Thanks for reading! Stay tuned!
These might also interest you:
There are users who find Notifications on Mac helpful while there are others who find them distracting. Whatever maybe your take on notifications, it is really easy to enable, disable and change notifications on your Mac.
Notification Center On Mac
The notification center on Mac keeps you informed about what is happening on your Mac and elsewhere in the world by displaying Alerts, Banners, and badge notifications from apps that you make use of on your Mac.
By default, most apps on Mac have their notification style set to Banners. However, you can change the notification style to Alerts or totally disable notifications for apps that you are not particularly interested in getting notifications from.
Unfortunately, there is no global setting for notifications on Mac. Hence, there is no way to disable or change the notification style for all the Apps at once on your Mac.
However, you can focus on certain active apps that appear to bother you quite often with Alerts or banners and change their notification behaviour or totally disable notifications from such active apps.
Enable or Disable Notifications On Mac
It can be really distracting to get notifications from the Mail or the Message App while you are trying to focus on work and trying to get something done. During such busy periods you can silence the Mail app by disabling notifications for this app on your Mac.
How To Turn Off Notifications Windows 10
1. Click on the Apple icon from the top Menu-bar of on your Mac and then click on the System Preferences… option in the drop-down menu.
2. On the System Preferences screen, click on Notifications.
3. On the Notifications screen, first click on the App for which you want to Enable or Disable Notifications (See image below)
4. To disable Notifications for the selected app, set the Alert Style to None (See image above).
Turn Off Notifications For One App Mac Youtube
5. Whenever you feel the need to enable notifications on Mac, change the Alert Style from None to either Alerts or Banners.
Change Notifications Style On Mac
Mac offers notifications in the form of Alerts and Banners. The main difference between these two types is that Banners appear in the upper right corner of your screen and go away automatically while Alerts will stay on the notification center and remain on the screen of your Mac, until they are dismissed manually by clicking on them.
This means that you are better off setting the Notification style to Alerts, in case you want to make sure that you do not miss any notifications for a particular app on your Mac.
1. Click on the Apple icon from the top Menu-bar of on your Mac and then click on the System Preferences… option in the drop-down menu.
2. On the System Preferences screen, Click on Notifications.
3. On the Notifications screen, first click on the App for which you want to Change the Notification Style and set the notification style to Banners, in case you want the notifications to appear on Mac and disappear on their own, without the need to attend to them.
You can set the Notifications style to Alerts when you want to make sure that you do not miss any notifications from a particular App on your Mac.
As you can see from the screen shot above, you can also Enable or Disable Notifications on the Lock Screen of your Mac and also choose whether or not a Lock Screen Notification should show a Message preview.