Text Message Badge Won't Go Away on Mac

I had the same issue (using iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia). I had deleted a spam text on my phone and my Mac showed a notification badge for which there was no message left to read. Tried the Siri solution and it just said "you have no unread messages."

I then tried selecting all the messages on the left panel of my Messages app on my Mac, all of which had been read, right-clicking and selecting "Mark as Unread," then right-clicking again and selecting "Mark as Read," at which point the notification badge disappeared.

If the Siri solution doesn't work for you, give this a try.

Here is a way of using this Siri solution without having to listen to each unread message.

Siri actually decrements the message count right at the beginning of responding to your request to read unread messages. You can click away from Siri—effectively cancelling the request—so you don't have to listen to the message being read through. Simply keep repeating this process of requesting and canceling until your unread message count is zero.

I agree, this is kinda annoying, but at least now we have a workaround. I used the "solution" to have Siri read to me all 15 of my "unread" text messages (they were already read on my other devices), and it worked, so obviously the badge does go away on the iMessage App icon in the Dock once Sonoma knows all messages have been read, so there must be only a small bit of code called for to remove this bug. Thanks, @AirForceDelta46 . Meanwhile, if I keep up on this status, it takes only a few seconds to clear the badge, and it’s only called for about once each two weeks or longer, so no biggie, right?

How about it, Apple? Maybe it's harder than we users think it is, perhaps due to the Mac being offline when a message is read on another device, and there is no straightforward way to keep that "mark that message read" task in some queue (in iCloud?) until the Mac goes online again (and in fact, the more I think about this, the harder to achieve this seems).

I wish there were some way to know more about how some behaviors in the Apple ecosystem are being left the way they are, and how users can best deal with them (maybe even take advantage of them). Some “ecosystems” (typically on Linux) have a “known issues” WWW page (or even better, a Wiki) that provides this awareness and collects additional info, perhaps even solution ideas for the developers.

Sending the message to myself from my Mac and then reading it on my iPhone worked! The other solutions (using Terminal command, asking Siri to read unread messages etc.) have worked for me in the past but didn't this time.

This worked for me! Simply went to the top right corner and clicked on Siri and said "Read all unread messages" she then read messages from like a year ago and asks if I want to reply. I said "No" three times and all the notifications were gone.

This worked for me. I had 84 on the badge counter. Having Siri read all of those spam messages would have driven me crazy. I selected my top most message, scrolled all the way down, held down shift, and selected my last message. Then, mark as unread, mark as read.

After a long search and reading and trying thoughtful but unproductive posts from this forum and others, I kept scrolling and came across your post. I asked Siri to read unread messages on all of my apple devices including watch, phone, iPad, MacBook. Finally the badges have disappeared and they appear to now be synced. Thank you.

None of these worked for me actually, and I ended up reaching out to Apple Support. Their next suggestion worked for me finally, which was:

Ask Siri to read you your unread messages

Thank you AirForceDelta46! Asking Siri to read messages worked for me as well. Turn out someone had a tapback to a message that I had seen on another device and was showing read when I filtered for unread messages, but still triggered the badge. A working "clear notifications from this device" for apps would help if notification syncing can't be fixed, Apple.

Wow! Genius! That worked! I've always had that nagging badge on my iMessage icon. I sent a test message to myself read it on my iPhone, read it on my mac and voila, gone.

Command click to select all, or a large group, of messages. Right click and "Mark as Unread." Then right click again and "Mark as Read." This worked for me.

This does work... though it had to be a long (unwanted, long-since-deleted) political campaign text that took minutes to read <groan>. And I had to turn on Siri on my Mac first (maybe Apple does this as a sneaky way to get Siri onto our Macs as well as phones?)

This is the only of all mentioned solutions, that worked for me. It was quite quick, so thanks for that :)

@PQuincy, please enlighten me: Why would anyone want to avoid/prevent Siri working on their Mac? And if you don't want Siri to listen for "(Hey, ) Siri", why don't you just turn it off in System Settings >> Siri and Spotlight? I'm not deriding you; I just really want to learn.