How to resolve "inactive" imessage on mac - Solution

Apple now enables phone calls and text messages through your mac or imac if it is connected through the same wifi network and logged in to the same icloud account.

When I downloaded yosemite for my imac I wanted to test these continuity features. But I was out of luck as I was stuck with an issue which had made my imessage inactive on my mac. imessage meanwhile perfectly on my iphone.

I tried everything from removing the keychain passwords, to restarting the computer numerous number of times after disabling the account etc. I ended up spending a couple of hours googling and trying to look for articles and videos on how to make this work and I thought its worth sharing with you.

My imessage looked something like this: As you can see it shows inactive on the left side panel.

Before starting this process check the timezone set for your router. It should match the time on your mac. I am not sure if this causes an issue but there were some users who wrote that this resolved the problem.

So here is the simple resolution for the same.

1. Open messages (which is inactive).
2. From the top menu go to messages -> preferences
3. Click on the accounts tab
Now your screen would look something like this:

4. Now click on the Details button.
5. This will ask you for your icloud username and password. Enter it.

6. If you have successfully logged in, You would see this screen.

7. Here most likely your Location would be set to empty or none. Select United States from the drop down or your country. My country was not in the drop down so I just selected United States and clicked Save.

8. Logout from messages app.

9. Quit the messages app.

10. Reopen messages.

Your imessage on the mac should now be active. Test it by sending a message to a friend who has an iphone with imessage active or yourself.

After this I was also able to setup my facetime to call my grocery store through my mac.

Let me know if this helped.

Thanks. Good luck.