How to Manage iPhone Messages – Tutorial

Messages are a staple diet of any modern day smartphone. They are quick, easy, convenient and almost always shorter than a call. The iPhone follows Apple tradition and adds a little style and panache to the messaging experience. The messages are not simply stored in an inbox, they are stored in conversations, exactly as a user would talk to someone face- to-face. Being colour coded, users can quickly scan a conversation to see the messages received and sent. The integrated copy, paste and replace commands mean that users take even further control of a conversation.

All this works beautifully for almost any exchange of messages, but as a conversation grows it can become unwieldy and sometimes irrelevant. This is where control needs to be passed to the user and as ever the iPhone does it with the greatest degree of functionality. Two taps and the message sender can be called, three taps and a conversation can be deleted. Three taps again and the user gets total control of the individual elements of a conversation – delete or forward, the choice is yours.

Step 1: View messages
Tap Messages to view the current list of sent messages. To remove a message first tap Edit. Hit the red ‘no entry’ icon, then the Delete button.

Step 2: Send a new message
To view a message thread tap the desired message in the list. To send a message hit the box at the bottom, type in a message and tap Send.

Step 3: Copy and paste
To copy text into a new message, tap and hold the appropriate speech bubble and tap Copy. Now tap the message box and hold and tap Paste to add.

Step 4: Text options
After pasting in text there is the option to Select, Select All and Paste. Tap Select to choose a word, hit Cut to remove, Copy or Paste.

Step 5: Select individual messages
If a message needs to be removed from a conversation first tap Edit. Each message will now have a radio button. Tap to select the message text.

Step 6: Delete or forward
Selecting messages activates Delete and Forward buttons. Tap Delete to get rid of selected messages, tap Forward to send messages to a new recipient.

Click on the image below to zoom in on the annotations.