How to merge SMS threads

[Lanky]

How often does your family or friends change their phone #? I have had several change their #’s because of upgrades, moving, etc… When they do so, there are now two threads of conversations in your SMS messages from the same person. If your one of those people like myself and would like to merge them back into one thread under their new phone #, here’s how:

1. Download SMS Backup & Restore from the Google Play Store.

2. Make a back-up of your SMS messages with the SMS Backup & Restore app. You can name the back-up whatever you want, but just make sure that there is a .XML extension. I usually use the date (8272013.xml). Remember where you store this in your phone. By default, the back-up is stored on your device in a folder called SMS Backup & Restore. It is recommended that you keep a copy of the original back-up in another folder just in case you mess something up.

3. Transfer the back-up to your computer and open it with Notepad (or some word editing program).

4. Up in the toolbar, click Edit and in the submenu click Replace.

5. Type in the “Find what” field the old phone #. It cannot have any dashes or spaces (example phone #: 17735551234).

6. Type in the “Replace with” field the new phone # (in the same format as mentioned in step 5).

7. Click “Replace all” and hit save.

8. Now transfer the revised back-up back into your phone in the same folder you pulled it from.

9. Open SMS Back-up & Restore and restore your revised back-up … and you’re done. The app will ask you before you restore if you would like to check for duplicates. I would recommend doing so, because if you do not, you will end up with duplicate messages. You can alternatively delete all of your SMS messages before you restore them … this way it will work faster when restoring and you will bypass risking duplicate messages.
Congratulations!!! You have successfully merged the two threads of conversations back into one!

 

[BlackStarRng3]

Easy, worked like a charm. Thank you very much for taking your time & posting this. I am truly happy right now that I was able to merge all of my fiance & my texts from beginning till this day together. You rock.
You had also made it step by step with easy instructions on how to do so.

 

[daniel florian]

"Type in the “Find what” field the old phone #. It cannot have any dashes or spaces (example phone #: 17735551234)".I didn't understand a word!!

 

[GoneDaddyGone]

"Type in the “Find what” field the old phone #. It cannot have any dashes or spaces (example phone #: 17735551234)".I didn't understand a word!!

The first barrier to understanding is the article has several Unicode characters that aren't getting decoded properly. Use this table to translate the weird characters:

Second, in the part of the article you quoted which we can now understand to be:

Type in the Find what field the old phone #. It cannot have
any dashes or spaces (example phone #: 17735551234)​

the author is narrating the use of a specific text editor (Windows Notepad) to perform a find and replace operation. Notepad has a Find what field (as well as a Replace with field as mentioned in the next step).

You can replace steps 3 through 7 with the single step:

• Transfer the back-up to your computer and use your favorite text editor to replace all occurrences of the old phone number to the new phone number. Note that the phone numbers must contain only numeric digits (e.g. 17735551234)

This guide is very useful although perhaps a bit hard to follow.