I got a question from a client; “I want to send a text message using the Messages app to 140 contacts, but I don’t want the recipients to see each other.”
In other words, similar to using the BCC field in email.
I can’t find any such function. Are any of you aware of a way to do this? (with the Mac or iPhone, I’m aware there are web services that can do this)
Looks like there are some apps in the iOS App Store that claim to do this. Search for BCC iMessage (or Messages)
Could they do something with shortcuts where they paste in a list of numbers and it sends messages one by one?
As per @geoffaire, pretty easy to do with Shortcuts. May have to do in batches perhaps to avoid spam flagging (??), but a repeat with each loop in a shortcut would be able to handle. Could even personalise the message with each recipient’s name.
Here’s the kind of shortcut I was thinking of. Again, no real knowledge if looping through 140 recipients would hit a spam flag by either Messages and/or carrier. Nonetheless, the actual mechanics should work…
And if you wanted to include further attempts at mitigating spam by varying the content, you could change the salutation based upon whether it’s an odd or even number in the sending run. So, “Hi,” alternates with “Hello,” as per this flow…
A few years back I looked at some apps that claim to do this. They were all terrible. Although, to be fair, I was ignoring anything I had to pay for up front (so only free or free trial apps). In the end, I determined that a shortcut was better. Creating my own shortcut gave me the freedom to get the behavior I wanted and the price was right.
Would adding a random Wait cooldown time make it look more random and avoid being flagged?
Quite possibly, but its requirement is just conjecture unless you actually run it. Might sail through. Might not.
While the need for a wait timer is definitely conjecture, this isn’t a large enough list IMHO to not use one. This is mostly because if you get flagged, there’s a chance there will be significantly increased scrutiny of your future messages. Not worth the risk.
Even waiting 10 seconds between messages would take less than 30 minutes for the whole send.
Sorry, I find this confusing. If I’m reading this right, you’re saying the need for a wait timer is debatable, but given the small list size you wouldn’t bother using one. Is that correct?
Regardless, and I’m conscious of over-engineering here, a “safer,” solution may be to just run periodically, writing/over writing a run count value to Data Jar. That way, you could run a smaller batch from the larger contact list, and then pick up from the next appropriate row by picking up the start index from a Data Jar value in the shortcut.
In terms of operational mechanics, I’m going to leave it at that.
My read on @webwalrus is that he’s saying that there are pros and cons, but the cons have a far bigger potential downside so why not use a mechanism to space out messages when there is little to no downside to doing so.
That’s exactly what I am saying.
Thanks for the input guys!
It’s a shame though that BCC:ing doesn’t exist natively for text messages – I can think of several occasions when it can get handy.
You’d probably find that it’s a restriction on the messaging protocol rather than an app restriction.
Given that the sender wants to use phone numbers and this means that some messages may be sent via sms message rather than via Apple’s messaging service.
I certainly wouldn’t see it as a common use case given that most entities who want to do this would be businesses which would use some form of message service.
And it’s helpful to remember that SMS was designed back in the 90s for quick, person-to-person, ephemeral messaging.
Email (in theory, anyway 
) was an alternative to things like letters and corporate memos, which could frequently be photocopied and mass-distributed. CC’ing and BCC’ing were part of office culture well before email, so email evolved to include them.
SMS is much more like leaving a post-it on somebody’s desk. Different medium, different expectations.
And FWIW, I don’t know that I’d want the average person to have the ability to quickly and easily BCC huge lists of people. Mostly because the only control I have over SMS messages is the rather heavy-handed “block sender.” II don’t want automatic notifications of every cute cat meme Aunt Edna thinks her whole contact list should see - but I want to know if she’s telling me Uncle Joe was just rushed to the hospital. 
Having to CC everybody publicly creates a scenario where even non-tech-savvy people tend to stop and think for a second before they mass-send a message.
Bemusingly, MVNOs with buggy MMS support end up sending group texts as separate individual texts, essentially BCCing everyone. You just can’t choose when it’ll happen. And it’s not iMessage.
Leaving aside all the side talk on SMS protocols etc. – on which I am clueless, if anyone needs it, I’ve built a shortcut to work based on splitting the total contact list into batches. It uses Data Jar to record progress through the list. So, say, with it configured to send 10 messages, incl. a wait of 1 second between each, run the shortcut, and it does the first 10. Come back to the shortcut again, upon running, it checks Data Jar then resumes at row 11 in the list etc.
Apparently there is ton of apps/services that do SMS marketing:
