Without deleting the old one in the history. Like in e-mails, I can compose a new e-mail thread from scratch. How can I do that with iMessages and SMSes? I like to keep things organized. This is in an old iPhone 11 Pro Max’s iOS v26.6.
Thank you for reading and hopefully answering soon. :)
One way is to create a new message with two recipients - in my experience this will start a new thread. Of course you will need a valid second message addressee (maybe you have a “spare” phone number such as an e-sim?) and will need to inform the first recipient what is happening.
I don’t think there is an easy answer. Everything that I know of that gives the illusion of threading is very expensive and aimed at enterprise users. SMS management tools in this category rely on tricks like inserting common bits of text (like hashtags or specific phrases) in messages in a programmatic way to allow searching and sorting. Another approach is to manage SMS sending through a database-driven back end. Again, enterprise only.
Aside from clever tricks like the one that @mpainesyd suggested, I don’t know of a practical solution aimed at consumers. I don’t see much out there outside of using search filters (which are slow and clunky in Apple’s Messages app) and archiving.
I only found this site with possible solutions by web search, no idea if it’s reputable or accurate, and I don’t have any Messages content to try techniques on but it seems there are ways (method 2 and 3) to archive a Message thread outside the app with Messages and iMazing.
Presumably after archiving and verifying the archived item and backing up you could delete the conversation in order to start a new one.
I suppose you’re referring to macOS, though the blog has a link to a 2023 post about iOS…