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Your first send

About five minutes, most of it spent deciding what to say. The app itself asks very little of you.

Before you start

You need a Mac on macOS 11 or later with Messages already signed in to your Apple account — which it will be if you have ever sent a text from this machine. If you want to reach people on Android, you also need your iPhone nearby with Text Message Forwarding switched on.

The five steps

  1. 01Sync your contacts. Human RM reads your macOS Address Book, along with your groups, custom fields and contact photographs. macOS will ask permission the first time. Nothing is uploaded — the app keeps everything in a file in your own user folder.
  2. 02Pick your people. Choose one of your address book groups, or bring in a CSV. Their faces appear. Click any one of them to leave that person out of this send — they drain to grey, sit it out, and stay in the group for next time.
  3. 03Write it once. Type your message with ::firstname:: anywhere a name goes. The preview beside it shows the finished message for each individual person, so you can see what they will actually read.
  4. 04Test it on yourself. Send one to your own number first. This is the step people skip and then regret — it is where you catch the tag you spelled wrong and the sentence that reads like a press release.
  5. 05Send. Messages go out one at a time with a few seconds between each, and every face lights up as their message lands. You can pause or stop at any point.

The first send asks for permission

The very first time Human RM sends anything, macOS asks whether it may control Messages. That prompt is the entire mechanism — it is what lets your texts leave from your own number instead of somebody else’s server. If you miss it or click the wrong button, the Messages permission guide puts it right.

How long a send takes

Longer than you might expect, and deliberately so. Messages leave one at a time with a short random pause between them, because a burst of identical messages is exactly the pattern carriers treat as spam. A hundred people takes several minutes. Four hundred takes a while — you can leave it running and get on with something else.

What to write

The app will send whatever you give it, so the only real risk left is the writing. Two things help more than anything else: write it to one person rather than to the list, and keep it shorter than feels finished. A blast is given away by its tone long before anyone works out how it was sent.