Apple devices permit you to mute individual conversations in Messages. Suppose one or members of a group are sending lots of messages. You don’t want to get dinged for each one but you still want to hear alerts for other conversations or receive notifications generally.
Instead of muting your whole device or enabling a Focus mode like Do Not Disturb, you can mute the one conversation. However, Messages doesn’t provide an aggregate list of muted threads, so you need to keep track of them on your own.
Mute a Conversation
To mute a conversation in Messages, swipe left partway and tap the purple button with a slashed bell glyph: 
. You’ll see the same glyph appear on the conversation, indicating its new state.
On iPhone and iPad, you can also long-press on the conversation listing and choose Hide Alerts, which also shows the slashed bell.
On Mac, if swiping isn’t accessible to you, you can right-click on the conversation and select Hide Alerts, choose Conversation > Hide Alerts, or press Command+Option+M.
Plus, each conversation thread’s Info panel provides a Hide Alerts toggle.
To unmute, follow any of these procedures to reverse the Hide Alerts setting.
So, Which Conversations are Muted?
Unfortunately, Messages doesn’t make it easy to know which conversations are mute. It would be logical if one of the built-in filters aggregated them. Send feedback to Apple if you’d like to see this in a future update.
For now, your best bet is to make a list of muted conversations. If muting is very short term, you might remember it natively. If you send and receive a lot of messages, I think it’s easy to forget, so a list in Notes, for example, is beneficial.
How do you handle incessant texting? Do you have a system of muting and tracking conversations that works for you?
Share your insights in the comments…
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