I love that the text messages sent to my iPhone also show up on my MacBook Air. Except my office motion sensor, which pops out alerts every day. I don’t want any to show up on screen. Can I block or mute a specific account?
That’s an interesting problem, so let’s sidetrack just a minute before we proceed. If you have a motion sensor in the office that’s being triggered too often, you should check the configuration to see if there’s a disable schedule feature, then have it ignore motion during 9-5, Mon-Fri or similar. If that can’t be done, you might consider a placement where it might be pointing directly at your desk chair, for example, so it doesn’t trigger when people walk past your area or cubicle. Or just unplug the pesky thing! 🙂
If you do want all the notifications then you’re in luck that you can indeed mute a specific text message sender in the Messages program. This feature, of course, works just as well with your Mother in Law too, as needed. I make no judgments, of course, but… ya never know…
Anyway, it’s easy to do on your Mac system, so let’s have a look.
First off, here’s a notification I just got from Xfinity. I like to have a minimum of alert messages so I’d just as soon not see this:
This would ordinarily show up on the top right of the screen and sit there for a few seconds. You can change that with the Notification control panel settings, but that affects all iMessage / Messages alerts, not just from a specific number.
Instead, go to your Messages app in MacOS X and find the same alert:
The key is that you want to select the sender on the left – as is denoted by it being in blue above. Then you want the Mac equivalent of a right click, the Control-Click. Do that over any of the blue portion and a menu of choices will show up:
As you can see, quite a few handy choices. Most importantly, though, is the highlighted entry: Do Not Disturb. Choose that and you’ll still get every single sms text message from that sender, but none of them will trigger an alert window. Easy!
How do you know that’s happened? A tiny crescent moon shows up:
If you ever want to turn off Do Not Disturb and let them again, well, disturb you, just reverse the process.