We have a 14 year old daughter we are trying to monitor her texting. We use a third party app that captures deleted texts but it’s not real-time not user friendly. How do I set up our phones wher all of her texts come to us as well?
IMessage access
messages
Related Solutions
As you can see in the first screenshot, you can set a number of email addresses by which you can receive messages at on your phone. However, as the second screenshot shows, you can only have one Apple ID connected to a device at a time.
You might be thinking, "Ok, can't I just add her Apple ID email address to my phone?"
The answer is no. Any time you add an email address to your iMessage account, the email is verified with Apple. If you attempt to add an email address associated with another Apple ID, Apple will decline it and neither iPhone nor OS X will not allow you to add the email address.
Conclusion: Unfortunately, there is no way to do this with iPhone or OS X. You could do what was previously suggested and set up a secondary account on your Mac (if you have one) and link that account to her Apple ID and use Message there to view the exchanges, but to specifically answer your question, OS X does not accept more than one Apple ID for iMessage per user and iPhone does not accept more than one Apple ID for iMessage either.
You need to understand that an Apple ID is not (or may not be) the same as an iCloud Account, which is not (or may not be) the same as an iTunes Store Account. An Apple ID is the credential set you use for accessing various services by Apple. Once you have an Apple ID, you can associate it with different services from Apple.
Anyone can create an Apple ID by visiting My Apple ID. Once you have an Apple ID (or more), you can choose how you would wish to use it.
For your case, you need three Apple IDs to keep things simple:
- One Apple ID shared between all the members of your family for content purchases from the iTunes and App Stores
- One individual Apple ID for your wife for iCloud, iMessage and FaceTime
- One individual Apple ID for you for iCloud, iMessage and FaceTime
Here's how you would use these Apple IDs on the devices and PCs:
iTunes Store Purchases - In the case of a family (and specifically for you), you would have one Apple ID whose credentials are known by all family members so that all content purchased from the iTunes and App Stores can be shared across all devices.
- You configure this on your iPhone, your wife's iPhone and your infant's iPod Touch under Settings > iTunes & App Stores menu option.
- You configure this in iTunes on your PC as well as on your wife's PC from the Store > Sign In... menu option.
iCloud Services - In almost every case, this would be an individual Apple ID so that Find My iPhone, Mail, Calendar, Reminders, etc., are segregated by user.
- You configure your Apple ID on your iPhone under Settings > iCloud.
- Your wife would configure her Apple ID on her iPhone under Settings > iCloud.
- You do not configure this in iTunes on the PCs. However, if you use the iCloud Control Panel for Windows, you can configure it there.
- You do not configure this for your infant at this point in time.
iMessage - In almost every case, this would be an individual Apple ID so that each person receives and manages messages intended for that person.
- You configure your Apple ID on your iPhone under Settings > Messages.
- Your wife would configure her Apple ID on her iPhone under Settings > Messages.
- You do not configure this anywhere on your PCs.
- You do not configure this for your infant at this point in time.
FaceTime - To avoid confusion, this would be an individual Apple ID for each person.
- You configure your Apple ID on your iPhone under Settings > FaceTime.
- Your wife would configure her Apple ID on her iPhone under Settings > FaceTime.
- You do not configure this anywhere on your PCs.
- You do not configure this for your infant at this point in time.
On content sharing between devices, you can use an account with up to 10 devices. Here's what iLounge says based on Apple's policy about "More than five family devices sharing a single iTunes account":
Actually, the limit of five devices per iTunes Store account only applies to authorizations for computers using iTunes. Apple actually allows you to have up to ten devices authorized in total for features such as iTunes Match and re-downloading previous purchases from iTunes in the Cloud, up to five of which can be computers running iTunes. So in other words, you could have anywhere from 10 iOS devices and no computers up to five computers and five iOS devices or any combination in between. You can view the number of devices that have been authorized for these features by going into your iTunes Store account information from within iTunes and choosing the Manage Devices option.
To share calendars, see iCloud: Share a calendar with others.
To share reminders, see iCloud: Share a reminder list.
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Best Answer
If they are iMessages then you could do it via iCloud. For SMS messaging or if it's over Whatsapp or another instant messenger, you could have a much harder time.
Most half decent services for messaging offer end-to-end encryption so it would be virtually impossible to act as a middle man as you're describing.
You could call your service provider and ask if they have any services for this kind of thing, but keep in the back of your mind - if you can do this to your child's phone, how do you know malicious hackers couldn't be doing the same to you.
This kind of privacy and security is a pretty hot topic at the moment so I think it would be scary if there did happen to be an easy way to accomplish what you are trying.