Mac · iMessage · SMS
How to send a mass text from your Mac — without putting everyone in one thread
Your Mac can already text. What it cannot do on its own is send the same message to two hundred people separately, so that each of them gets their own note and none of them sees the others. That takes one extra piece.
The problem
Messages has a group button, and that is the whole trouble.
Open Messages on a Mac, start a new conversation and type in forty names, and you have made a group chat. Everyone can see everyone. Every reply goes to all forty. Someone asks a question meant only for you and thirty-nine other phones light up at two in the afternoon.
The alternative Messages leaves you is to open forty separate conversations and type forty separate messages, which works perfectly and takes an afternoon. Most people get to eleven and stop.
What is actually needed is the second version done by a machine: a real one-to-one conversation with each person, each one carrying their own name, sent from your own number. That is what Human RM does, and the reason it has to be a Mac app rather than a website is that it works by driving the Messages app you already have signed in.
How
Three steps, from your own machine.
- 01
Bring in your people
Sync the macOS Address Book and your groups, custom fields and contact photographs come with it. Or drop in a CSV if the list lives in a spreadsheet.
- 02
Write it once
Type ::firstname:: anywhere a name goes. A live preview shows the exact words each individual person will read, before anything is sent.
- 03
Send, and watch
Messages leave one at a time with a short pause between each, so your carrier stays comfortable. Every face lights up as their message actually lands.
Why a Mac
The Mac is the reason this can send from your real number.
Every web-based mass texting service has the same structural problem: it is not you. It sends from a number it rents, which your contact does not recognise, into a thread that has no history. That is fine for a delivery notification and wrong for telling four hundred people your father died.
A Mac app can do what a website cannot — use the Messages account already signed in on the machine. Blue bubbles stay blue. The message appears in the thread you and that person have been using for six years. If they reply, it comes to you, in the same place it always has.
The same logic covers your contacts. There is no upload and no account, because the app reads your Address Book locally and keeps everything in a file in your own user folder. Nothing about who you know ever reaches us. The privacy page is the long version.
Requirements
What you need before you start.
A Mac on macOS 11 or later
With Messages signed in to your Apple account — which it almost certainly already is.
An iPhone, only for green bubbles
Text Message Forwarding switched on lets your Mac send SMS to Android phones through it. iMessage needs nothing extra.
Your contacts, wherever they are
The macOS Address Book, an iCloud account, or a CSV exported from anywhere.
A Gmail account, only for email
Optional. Connect it and Human RM sends from your real address with your real signature.
Questions
What people ask about texting from a Mac.
›Can you send a mass text from a Mac at all?
Yes, and better than from a phone. Your Mac already has Messages signed in to your Apple account, so anything you send goes out from your real number. What it lacks on its own is a way to send the same message to two hundred people separately — Messages will only put them all in one group thread. That is the gap Human RM fills.
›Does it use my own phone number?
It does. There is no rented number, no short code and no third-party sending service. Each message lands in the conversation your contact already has with you, so it looks exactly like every other text you have sent them — because it is.
›Do I need my iPhone nearby?
For iMessage, no — your Mac sends those on its own. For SMS to Android phones, yes: your iPhone has to be on the same Apple account with Text Message Forwarding switched on, because that is the route a green-bubble message takes.
›How many people can I send to at once?
There is no limit set by the app. What sets the practical ceiling is your carrier, so messages go out one at a time with a short random pause between them rather than in a burst. A few hundred is routine.
›Will this get my number flagged as spam?
Sending one at a time with natural pauses is exactly what keeps that from happening — a burst of identical messages is what carriers look for. The bigger protection is that you are texting people who know you and who have your number saved. That is a different thing from bulk marketing, and it behaves differently.
›What about email?
Human RM sends email as well, through your own Gmail account with your real send-as address and signature. Useful for the people in your address book whose phone number you never got.
Your Mac can do this today. It just needs the part that keeps everyone apart.
14 days free, the whole thing. Then $12 a month.