“Maybe” in front of contact name

Did you ever find a fix for this? I’m having the same problem.

Also on ios 18. Also logged in and out of icloud. Tweaked all the Siri settings. Deleted and re-added contact.

Nothing has worked. Still showing “maybe” and “to you & <contact name>” on the notification.

I have this exact same issue. Also happens with my wife, who has been in my contacts for many years. This only happens on my phone. My other devices are unaffected. I have also tried various other fixes and none have worked.

Very clearly a bug in iOS 18. Pretty frustrating for a core feature like this to working incorrectly.

I fixed it for me (at least for now).

The only way to preserve message history is if you have your messages in iCloud.

First I removed the contacts email from their contact.

I then disabled iCloud messages on my phone. This allows me to delete conversations while keeping the originals in iCloud.

Then I deleted the conversion with the person in question.

I reenabled iCloud messages. This loaded back two conversations into my messages app. The conversations were still broken. I then blocked the email address for the removed email.

I then disabled iCloud messages, deleted both of the now separated conversions. I then reenabled iCloud messages.

I then unblocked the email and re-added it to the persons contact.

Not sure how much of this was necessary or not. The person was periodically messaging me throughout this process.

Same exact issue. Only happening with my wife. Weird thing is that it just started for me this week when she had to go travel for work out of state. I’ve been on io18 since June and it’s been fine.

nine of the solutions in here have worked.

additionally about a month ago an entire year of mine and my wife’s messages history just disappeared from the phone. It’s still visible on my Mac so I know it’s in iCloud but the phone is not showing it anymore.

some bizzare behavior since updating to io18

Follow up to myself.

I finally found a “fix”.

the other “solutions” in this thread did nothing for me. The comments about iCloud disassociating phone with email got me thinking. So I went into my wife’s contact info and removed her email address. When I went back to the messages app a new second wife thread appeared with all the messages that must have got sent from her email instead of phone number. I just deleted this thread and then re-added her email back to her contact info. Notifications went back to normal.

I do understand that this might not be a good solution to some people though if the number of messages send from email is large and includes messages that you don’t want to lose but I was lucky that there was only a couple that got separated out and none were anything important or save worthy.

The bug seems to be that the phone is not properly associating the contact's iMessage phone number with the name on the contact card, so avoiding the "Maybe" suggestion is actually a red herring: that just results in the contact's phone number being displayed in the notification instead. It gets sent "To you & (name associated with contact's iMessage email address)" because there are often iMessages in the chat history that used the email instead of the number. In other words, in the notification only and only with iMessages (not SMS), iOS 18 seems to have broken the association of the contact's iMessage phone number with the contact name bearing that number, but it hasn't broken the association of the contact's iMessage email address with that name. So it thinks there's a mystery number sending a message to you and to the contact's own name. It's maddening but weirdly I'm not experiencing it on my laptop, iPad, or Apple Watch -- only on my iPhone.

See related thread here, which is what's happening when it's not yet suggesting "Maybe" + contact's name:

Contact is displayed as number, and is se… - Apple Community

It’s up to the AI to determine who a contact might be if they are not already saved to Contacts, thus showing "Maybe:" in front of a contact's name.

Here's how to remove maybe from iPhone contacts.

1. On your iPhone, open Settings.
2. Tap Contacts.
3. Tap Siri & Search.
4. Toggle off Show Contact Suggestions.

Same exact issue, just woke up and it started happening. Clearly, this is a bug on apple’s end, I’ve already notified them, hopefully this gets resolved as it’s absolutely obnoxious and for the last 10 months, there has been ongoing issues with iMessage, including losing messages Which iOS 18 just fixed and now this .

You can disable this feature, if you want, by:

1. Go to Settings --> Mail, Contacts, Calendars
2. Under Contacts > Siri & Search > Fine Contacts in Other Apps, toggle the switch to the OFF position
3. Under Calendar > Siri & Search > Fine Contacts in Other Apps, toggle the switch to the OFF position
4. Under Mail > Siri & Search > Fine Contacts in Other Apps, toggle the switch to the OFF position

The problem is Messages bundling into the same thread all messages sent to one contact no matter which of their phone number or email you sent it to. And now apparently it can’t figure out anymore when they message you back from a different number/email than the last from the thread…

My solution is to go to in your contacts for that person, tap info, message, choose one of the phone numbers/emails, send a test message and have them text you back. If it still does it resto that choosing the next number/email until it’s solved.

And maybe to prevent it on your end go to your settings, message app, send and receive, and only send from one of your numbers/addresses.

Same issue, with messages coming from wife’s iPhone. So annoying. Have not been able to fix yet.