Why does my iPhone show "Maybe" in Contacts for my wife's name?

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.

So (with the help of Apple support rep) I was able to find a solution, at least for my situation. With the latest upgrades to Siri in ios18, it’s pulling data from more apps. In this case, WhatsApp (which typically uses a phone number as ID) was the cause. Navigate to app settings, disable “Learn from this app” under “Apple intelligence and Siri”.

Check this setting in any app that might be using the same email or phone number as iMessage.

I was just on the phone with Apple Support for over an hour and they told me that it is a bug. They also advised me to file a bug report for Contacts at Apple.com/feedback so their dev team can be aware of it. They also encouraged others who are having this issue to also file a report so Apple can address this sooner - so please take a minute to file one if you can! Thank you!

I think I finally figured it out. Deleting multi conversations sort of helped but it always came back. I kept racking my brain WHY IS IT ALL OF OUR WIVES??? No one says it's their best friend, or their girlfriend or their mom.

It's the Medical Emergency contact! I went into mine in the settings and my wife was in there twice. I delete one of the entries and it went away! (the "maybe" part) it still thinks there is a group. I need to work through that and figure it out, but I think this brings progress. Maybe it will help others?

Might have to delete the entire conversation to get rid of the "group" thing. But I REALLY don't want to do that, so I'm looking for other solutions before trying that. When I removed both phone # and email address from my wife's contact, it separated into 2 chats. I was tempted to delete one of them, but then I lose half the conversation. Will keep digging.

I can ONLY tell it thinks its a group because siri announces it when I have my airpods in. Other than that, you probably would have no idea unless using carplay.

Had same issue and solved it. In my case, it was triggered after I went abroad and added an eSim with a number from another country. It happened not only with my spouse but many other contacts. My contacts are synched via iCloud and I have iOS 18.3.2. The problem occurred on my iPhone and not other devices.

I believe in my case this happened because the numbers in my contacts did not have the international prefix (+1 for US) but from abroad, the number detected by the phone included the prefix. So the number of the caller/text sender did not match the one in my contacts. For people where I had the +1 in the contacts, the issue did not happen. The "Maybe" was iOS/Siri trying to be smart and suggesting that the calling/texting number corresponded with the one in the contacts.

The fix was to add each unrecognized number to the corresponding existing contact. (A bit tedious, but not nearly as bad as some suggestions to wipe out the phone...) Then the contact would have two numbers, one with and one without the international prefix. This demonstrated that the contacts app is not smart enough to know that +1(8*2)***-***2 is the same as (8*2)***-***2. I deleted the one without the prefix. After that, all numbers were recognized and the conversations got merged correctly.

Lesson for the future: always add the international prefix if you are ever going to use the phone from different countries.

Hope this helps.

[Edited by Moderator]

I also had the same issue after updating to the newest iOS. With my husband and husband only text messages, I had these same issues with the previous texts disappearing when you would try to scroll up to find an old text and then when he started texting me it would say “maybe” hubby and his name and look like he was texting with me in a group chat when really it was just one contact. I tried other things people said in the comments, but what worked for me to fix it was deleting our thread completely. I also deleted it entirely from the “recently deleted”

I manually typed in his cell (he has a business line as well so he has 2 numbers) and created a new thread and that fixed the problem. Hope this helps someone else because that sure was frustrating. Hated that I had to delete our messages for over 3 years, but whatever. Apple needs to fix this

This is PRECISELY what was happening with my wife’s messages to me. Identical issue. Only fix that worked was permanently deleting the Recently Deleted messages on both iPhones. Hope this helps someone. Would have save me a couple hours researching it.

Found a "fix" that worked for me, and hope it helps others.

Step 1: Inside the Messages app, start a new message with the contact you are experiencing this issue with. (Press the button on the top right side of the screen)

Step 2: Manually enter the phone number of the contact you are experiencing this issue with, and send them a text.

Step 3: A new message thread should open up with this contact, delete the new message thread that opened.

Step 4: Might take some time, but once your contact texts you, the notifications should go back to normal

I hope this helps someone!

i’ve been facing this issue as well since my wife and i upgraded iphones and switched carriers.

none of the above replies ended up solving my issue, but what has seemed to work so far is turning off imessage altogether and forcing texts to go through between the phones as SMS a few times before reactivating imessage. it then took a bit of coaxing to get the messages to go through as imessage instead of SMS, but once they switched back over everything seems to be working.

i did end up with the prior messages on my ipad splitting when i did this, but deleting the message associated with the email address seems to have cleaned that up.

just an fyi, this error seems tame in that it’s just annoying to have ‘maybe’ in front of a known contact’s name, but in fact it can mean that your text messages aren’t going through at all (i.e., it may be annoying that texts are going to your partner’s work phone, but if they didn’t have that phone they wouldn’t be receiving your messages at all like it was in my case)

Thanks, soapmacintosh; this solution from soapmacintosh worked for me:

>Found a "fix" that worked for me, and hope it helps others.

Step 1: Inside the Messages app, start a new message with the contact you are experiencing this issue with. (Press the button on the top right side of the screen)

Step 2: Manually enter the phone number of the contact you are experiencing this issue with, and send them a text.

Step 3: A new message thread should open up with this contact, delete the new message thread that opened.

Step 4: Might take some time, but once your contact texts you, the notifications should go back to normal

I hope this helps someone!

I was able to fix this from happening on my phone. I made a purchase using my wife’s email address the the password to the retailer. Siri used the learning function to associate her email address and name to text messages I received from her. I deleted the email “permanently” and it fixed it immediately. I think the bug has to do with the learning function. But you have to find out what message(s) are causing that.

FINALLY a fix. 2 months later, finally got a senior advisor who would not give up - and he fixed it!!

You HAVE to wipe the phone completely. Had to do a FULL reinstall of all phone software using a laptop, *NOT* just with the phone. You have to wipe the phone COMPLETELY. My advisor thinks when I installed the ios18 update, something corrupted. So all the updates in the world wouldn’t fix it. From my understanding there are usually safeguards in place to prevent this corruption from happening but for whatever reason mine didn’t.

Using the computer to reinstall is the crucial part of the fix. It’s essentially all new software whereas with the phone, it’s not.

I hope this helps someone. This was a NIGHTMARE for me for 2 months.

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.