Thursday, March 10, 2016

Deregister an old Mac from getting iMessages forwarded to it

Tricky situation SOLVED.

iPhone was setup to have iMessages and SMS forwarded to the Messages app on a MBP  
MBP goes away for some reason (longer in your possession)
On the iPhone under General>Messages>Text Message Forwarding the old MBP name shows up on the iPhone still.  (ok not so great)

NOW WHAT?  Who wants that key floating around out there waiting for someone to login and start getting your personal texts.  Yeah I know that's a little paranoid to think of the hoops that need to be jumped through to get there, nonetheless, it's a genuine security concern.  An encryption key is an encryption key after all.

SOLUTION: Head over to https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage/us/en.  This will un-register the phone from ALL devices, be they in your possession or not.   Wait a few hours and re-register only on the machines you want it registered on.

Nifty trick with lots of good use cases