Assign a Name to Group Chats in Messages for Mac

When you’re engaged in a group conversation in Messages for Mac, you’ll notice the ‘To’ section lists the names of people participating in the group chat. While that’s certainly adequate for most situations, if you have a specific group chat going for a specific purpose, you can assign a name to any given group chat thread in the Messages app.

For example, if you have an ongoing message thread with several coworkers, you could label the group chat ‘work’, or if you have a bunch of family in a message thread, you could label that thread as ‘family talk’, or anything else that fits the description of the group conversation.

Assigning group names to Message threads is really easy in OS X:

1. From the Mac Messages app, select a group conversation so that it’s the active window or chat in Messages
2. Click on the “Details” button in the upper right corner of the message thread
3. At the top of the details panel, look for ‘Group Name’ and click into that section to enter a group name for the given group message

That’s all there is to it, the change is immediate and it will reflect in the ‘To’ portion of the Messages thread.

Tn this screen shot example we’re renaming a group conversation to the descriptive and exciting “Dude Talk”, because it’s an obvious name that stands out well for this walkthrough. Aim for a descriptive name, which is often better than a bunch of names for this given thread.

One important thing to note is that everyone in the group message will see the new group name. Thus, you will want to pick appropriate group names for your message conversations too, as the names appear to sync over iMessage.

If you add new contacts to the group chat, they will be automatically included under the group name that was originally given to that conversation thread. The group name will stay in place even if you clear the chat transcript for that message, though closing the message window and leaving the chat will cause the group name for the conversation to be lost. Muting the conversation has no impact on the group name, though it can be helpful to rename a group chat that has been muted to perhaps emphasize why that conversation was silenced to begin with.