The thing you are trying to do
Text a lot of people at once, so that each of them gets their own message
There is no setting for this. Not on the iPhone, not on the Mac, not in any version of Messages Apple has shipped. If you have gone looking for it and come up empty, that is why — and here is what to do instead.
What people try first
Three approaches, and where each one breaks.
The group message
The one Messages makes easy, and the one that turns ninety-nine relationships into a single thread nobody wanted to join. Every reply reaches everyone. People start muting by the third one, and the polite ones leave.
BCC on an email
It hides the list, which solves the wrong half. It still reads as a broadcast, still opens with "Hi there", and still lands in Promotions. The people who know you best notice first.
Copy, paste, repeat
The only version that genuinely works, and the reason almost nobody finishes it. Not for lack of caring — because two hundred conversations is a real afternoon, and you never have the afternoon.
What works
Do the third one, but let the machine do the typing.
The manual version is right. Each person in their own thread, their own name, their own message. It fails only on the labour, which is exactly the kind of problem a computer is for.
Human RM opens a separate one-to-one conversation with every person on your list and sends them their own copy, from your own number, through the Messages app already signed in on your Mac. You write it once. Two hundred people each receive a message that was, as far as anything they can see goes, written to them.
Because the messages are genuinely separate, everything downstream behaves properly. Replies come back to you privately. Nobody can reply-all. Nobody sees a list of names. And the person who no longer speaks to the person three names below them never finds out they were in the same sentence.
The details that matter
Small things that decide whether it reads as personal.
Their name, not a placeholder
Type ::firstname:: and each person sees their own. Anything from a CSV column works too — a kid’s name, a city, the thing you last spoke about.
Preview before you commit
The app shows you the finished message for each individual person before a single one is sent. Most blasts are given away by one clumsy line, and this is where you catch it.
Leave someone out with a click
You already spoke to her this morning. Click her face; she sits this one out and stays in the group for next time. Nobody has to be deleted just to be skipped.
One person, one message
The friend saved twice under two spellings, the couple who share a number — merged before anything sends, with a count of how many, so nobody hears from you twice in a minute.
Questions
What people ask before they try this.
›How do I text multiple people without it becoming a group chat?
You have to open a separate conversation with each person and send them their own message. There is no setting in Messages that turns a group text into individual ones — the group is the message. Doing it by hand works and takes an afternoon; Human RM does the same thing automatically, one thread at a time.
›Is this the same as BCC for text messages?
It is the outcome people mean when they ask for BCC, but it works differently. BCC sends one message with the other recipients hidden. Human RM sends genuinely separate messages — a real one-to-one conversation with each person, in the thread you already share. Nobody is hidden because nobody else is in the room.
›Will they be able to tell it was sent to other people too?
Not from the message. Each person receives their own thread with their own name merged in, exactly as if you had typed it. What gives a blast away is writing like a blast — so the app shows you a preview of the individual message each person will actually receive, before anything goes.
›What happens when someone replies?
It comes back to you privately, in the conversation you already had with that person. No other recipient sees it and nothing is grouped. Replies are the part that makes this worth doing — a group text suppresses them, and individual messages invite them.
›Does the iPhone have a setting for this?
No. iOS has a setting for whether group messages behave as MMS or iMessage, which is a different question. There is no built-in way on iPhone or Mac to send one written message as many separate conversations.
Everyone hears from you. Nobody hears from everyone else.
14 days free, the whole thing. Then $12 a month.