Often, we get a lot of notifications, especially on our instant messaging apps like iMessage. Sometimes we by chance open a conversation which we planned to read later on and now it is showing read to the other user and your notifications are also cleared. So, if you want to mark your iMessage as unread, well you cannot directly do that, instead, we have an alternative of that which is mentioned below.

There have been rumours of this feature coming with iOS 14 and 15 as well, but sadly Apple hasn’t released that feature yet. Instead, Apple has launched pinning of messages on iMessage which can be a handy feature to remember some important conversations.

‘Mark as unread’ feature is desired by a lot of users in the Apple community. The pinning feature doesn’t replicate the mark as an unread feature, but it can surely get the job done for half of the people who miss out on important conversations as they have opened the messages. But for those who purposefully want to ignore users and keep it unread, then it’s still a bummer for them as of now.

In addition to replying or reminding for important messages by pinning them, you can also use the pinning feature to mark conversations to refer back to them.

There isn’t any feature in iMessage to mark as unread, but there are a few alternatives that you can do to remind yourself of a conversation to reply to.

Forward the Message to Yourself

You can forward the message that you’d like to be reminded of yourself. That way you will have a notification pending which you can attend later on.

1. To forward the message, tap and hold the message. A small pop-up box will appear, you can tap the More option.
   
2. Then, you need to tap on the ‘forward’ option in the bottom-right corner of the screen.
3. Next, you will have to enter your contact details in the To section and then forward the message to yourself.
   

The new message to yourself will be unread and can serve you as a reminder for the original message that you still need to reply to. Although an even better option than the above-mentioned is right ahead, you should check that out.

Ask Siri to Remind You

You can always ask Siri, your virtual assistant, to remind you of anything. So, all you need to do is just use your assistant to set a reminder for you to reply to a conversation. You can name the reminder as per your convenience and have a custom date and time as well. Follow through the tutorial to ask Siri to set a reminder for you to reply to a conversation.

1. Make sure that the messages app is opened on your iPhone, invoke Siri by pressing the home button or saying ‘Hey Siri. Then say ‘Remind me about this in an hour’ or whichever time suits you.
   
2. A reminder for the message will be created, and you will get a notification when the timer window is up.

Till Apple adds the feature to iOS, we can use the above alternative methods to remind yourself of those conversations that you missed because you open the conversations by chance.