Which Message Types Does PhoneLeash Forward on iPhone?

On iPhone, PhoneLeash forwards every text message that arrives in the iOS Messages app — that includes SMS (green bubbles), iMessage (blue bubbles), and RCS messages from other carriers. As soon as a text arrives, it is forwarded to your email address within seconds.

How It Works

PhoneLeash uses Apple's Shortcuts automation to detect incoming texts. The Shortcuts “Message” trigger fires once for every message that lands in Messages, regardless of whether it arrived as SMS, iMessage, or RCS. PhoneLeash reads the sender and the message body from that trigger and sends them to your email.

What's Not Forwarded

MMS attachments — pictures, audio, video, and contact cards — are not exposed by iOS Shortcuts, so only the text portion of an MMS message is forwarded. See Does PhoneLeash forward MMS? for the full explanation.

Group text messages are forwarded — the message body and the sender's name come through normally — but iOS does not tell PhoneLeash that the message arrived in a group conversation. The forwarded email looks the same as a one-on-one text from that sender, with no indication that other participants received it too.

Need More?

If you need MMS forwarding, WhatsApp forwarding, or reply-from-email, PhoneLeash for Android supports all of them. The two apps share the same backend, so you can run both on different devices and forward into a single email inbox.