Sorry for the delay... text message organizing question

October 22, 2019 8:02 PM

How can I organize my text messages to make sure I don't forget to respond to them, even if I can't respond in the moment? Is there an app for iPhone that will let me organize or categorize the messages?

I use my personal number also for my job, and a LOT of people communicate with me by text. And i like it that way. When I'm working I have a few seconds every hour to glance at text messages (and make sure my next client is arriving, nobody has called me from my kid's school, to answer LOL to a friend, etc) but I don't have time to give real answers to more nuanced or complicated texts. 8 hours goes by, and then I pick up my kid, and then - messages slide further down the list and are gone. This is not good. Is there a better way to flag messages than to mark them as unread? is there really no text messaging organizer besides Messages for iPhone in 2019? I'd basically like a gmail inbox for my texts, thanks.

posted by andreapandrea to Technology (5 answers total)

I get texts via my Google Voice number. Google provides an option to forward texts to email, so I can organize texts into folders, or use labels, and search, etc. (Note that forwarding texts to email opens a security loophole, in that someone who has access to your email but not your phone can now get your texts anyway. So if that's a concern, this is a bad idea).
posted by alittleknowledge at 9:37 PM on October 22, 2019

I use the Signal messaging app for Android as my primary message handler, and to do this very thing I long-press the message I want to put on hold and then forward it to a contact called Note to Self, which has my own phone number. Can't see any reason why a similar trick wouldn't work in pretty much any messaging app.

If you wanted to make it more structured and get something like folders, you could set up a bunch of different forwarding targets, all with your own number.
posted by flabdablet at 2:18 AM on October 23, 2019

I use IFTTT similar to the what alittleknoeledge is describing. All incoming texts are sent to email where they are treated with the same kind of sorting and tickles/reminders that Gmail applies to everything else.
posted by Mo Nickels at 6:25 AM on October 23, 2019

This might not be what you're looking for, but whenever I want to "read" a text without actually marking it as "read," I use the press-and-hold-and-pull-down method on iPhone to "preview" the text. That way, it stays as unread but I still get to scan the content so I know what's inside.
posted by knownassociate at 8:39 AM on October 23, 2019

It's not a very elegant solution, but when I want to make sure I respond to a text later, I'll just type a period in the response field. This marks it as a Draft, which means the text chain goes to the top of my inbox, and it shows the word "Draft:" under the sender/recipients in a different color in the inbox list. This is using the Textra app on an Android phone. I imagine this solution might not be ideal on an app like iMessage, which shows the other party when you've read a message and when you're typing (Textra does neither of those).
posted by hootenatty at 2:03 PM on October 23, 2019