Agreed. I've been missing this since AIM went bust.

I also wish there were a way for me to send a low-priority message to my wife so that it didn't notify her regardless of her notification settings. We send each other news articles throughout the day but don't really want to interrupt each other. It would be great if there were a sender-side option that could enable this.

I've thought about using a shared document in the Notes app, or just use a different messaging app for low-priority stuff, but it seems like too much overhead. Does anyone else have a way of handling this?

You could create a group with only the both of you in your messaging app and set that group to not have notifications, then you keep the direct messages for urgent stuff. You could even have more than one group to keep conversations on separate topics organized.

Email?

IMO, no one should have have email that sends notifications.

When we're on our computers, email notifications come up unless we're in DND (and even then, they show up whenever your email client is visible regardless).

For me, I have to open my email browser window to see new emails. No notifications. (And no client which I would set to 100% DND if I had one.)

DND should be default and there should be custom sounds for different contacts. Ofc its not our computer anymore, you are not in control. Still, its weird that our digital overlords didn't implement this. Is it copyrights? Are ringtone purchases such good money? I have no idea.

Fair enough! I don't think email threads are best for daily spousal communication, but perhaps for some people this could work. It sure would be easier to search than Apple Messages!

Damn, PREACH.

If it's urgent, the sender will call.

And, even then, unless I am on-call there should be no expectation that I am always available even during work hours.

PREACH. AGAIN.

I feel like not replying is a simpler solution.

Text messaging is asynchronous communication, if someone is expecting an immediate response, they should be calling.

Then it had better be really urgent unless you're one of a handful of people. Even as an older person, I mostly ignore phone calls if I don't recognize the caller ID--and, even then, unless it's a call I know I want to take for whatever reason.

ADDED: Where I work, chat is a more time sensitive than email but basically no one phones out of the blue.

Focus mode is better because you do not get distracted at all by the ping. This allows people to send you a message at any time and you will see it at some regular interval. I'm fine checking messages once an hour but currently they come in at random times regularly. One 10 message ping is much less distracting than 10 pings.

I would much rather someone press a button to say "This is very important, send it now" over calling me where I have to scramble to turn off my music, put my headphones on, etc before answering.