How to Make iMessage work on MacBook?

I know this is a pretty stupid question, but does the recipient of the iMessage need to be online for a message to send?

I had this working a few weeks ago, but now I've re-located, it's stopped sending.

I've checked the accoount settings, re-set my password, signed out and back in again, but still it's not sending a message - except to myself! That works fine - that's why I'm asking if the recipient needs to have iMessage running - though i thought it would send an SMS to an iPhone too??

Baffled!

st3v1e:

As far as I understand, the recipent does not need to be online, but the messages are not stored forever, so he has to come online at some point (before Apple deletes it - I have no idea how long that is). Your message should be marked as sent even though the recipient is offline, but you won't get a "delivered" status (or "read" obviously) until the person is online again.

You should be able to hold your finger for a second or two on a message and select "Send as text" (it may say something different, my iOS is not in English) to send a normal SMS text message. But if both of you has iMessage, it shouldn't be a problem. I don't think this necessary to say, but iMessage ONLY works for people with iOS devices. BOTH of you has to have an iOS device. If your friend does not have an iOS device anymore, you won't be able to send iMessage messages to him.

I cant access to my iMassage it says "YOU ARE CURRENTLY RESTRICTED FROM USING IMASSAGE" why? what's happening?

Hi,

Parental Controls on the Mac User account you are logged in with.

8:46 pm Thursday; May 22, 2014

Hello,

this was baffling me as well. I went in and reset all my time and date settings to "automatic" and voila! It works. Go figure. Thank you for posting this.

Simple, but this works, Thank you