how to show the number of an sms sender instead of his contact name on iphone4?

Hackamor wrote:

sometimes you want to know which number that contact is using to send you an sms from!!!! don't you agree?

No, actually I can't imagine a situation where knowing the number a person was texting me from would be important as long as I knew who was texting me.

The only solution I can think of is to set up multiple contact entries for that person with the number in the contact name, e.g., "Ed 909-555-1212", "Ed 909-555-4343", etc.

If you scroll to the very top of the texts there should be a "contact" button. If you hit that, it will open their contact info and if there is more than one number you have for them, the one that the text was sent from will be in blue with a star next to it. Hope that helps!

Thanks Jackie Dee for this, it was driving me nuts. You are right, the number is blue, although there is no star next to it. I just would love to know how this is meant to be "obvious".

And to Meg, I am sure you were trying to be helpful, but in this instance, your responses serve no useful purpose other than cluttering up the support forum.

I hope you do not think I am being too harsh, it is just that I read through a lot of useless threads before I landed on this one, which was actually useful at long last. However, I almost gave up scrolling through when I saw your reply (would have been a bad move, but one gets a bit impatient when one wastes time trying to solve a problem that should not be there in the first place).

In my case, the person that texted me has 4 different international numbers, and depending on which one she texted from, she would have had to pay from nothing to USD 3.00 per text received, not an insignificant sum:-)

allovertheplace wrote:

And to Meg, I am sure you were trying to be helpful, but in this instance, your responses serve no useful purpose other than cluttering up the support forum.

So, answering an opinion question that someone asked and offering a possible solution (yes, it turned out there was a better one) serves less purpose and clutters up the forum more than resurrecting a thread that has been dormant for three years? Thank you, I will take that under advisement.

Actually this solution does not work reliably in my case. I have some contacts with various phone numbers, and thus I have some message threads in which messages from various numbers of the same contact are interspersed. However, in many cases, after tapping on "Info", the number that appears in blue is not the number that corresponds to the message I was just looking at. I'm not sure what the logic is --- perhaps the number appearing in blue is simply the one that was most recently used for the given contact? If any one has a link to documentation on this, that would be helpful.

Lucas_D wrote:

Actually this solution does not work reliably in my case. I have some contacts with various phone numbers, and thus I have some message threads in which messages from various numbers of the same contact are interspersed. However, in many cases, after tapping on "Info", the number that appears in blue is not the number that corresponds to the message I was just looking at. I'm not sure what the logic is --- perhaps the number appearing in blue is simply the one that was most recently used for the given contact? If any one has a link to documentation on this, that would be helpful.

Sorry, it wasn't my solution. It was suggested by someone named JackieDee. However, I can hazard a guess the at the number in blue may be an iPhone. I have contacts who have both iPhones and the phones and, as I recall, the iPhone number shows in blue.

Right, sorry I about that, I hadn't meant to make my reply to you specifically. And thanks for the idea about iPhone numbers. Indeed, I had also wondered if numbers that correspond to iPhones appear in blue. I suppose there must be documentation for this --- I should search around a bit more.

I also have the same problem and Jackie Dee's solution was the answer glad found it first try. I tried it and it is true except the star thing. You can try it by sending a txt to a contact with multiple numbers and check it using the button beside the recepient name with ! Mark and it will show as blue font even if its the last phone number in the list and try it again using his/her other numbers to confirm.

It's not a situation that crops up much in my life but, as international texting is not terribly expensive for me, I don't worry about it when I need to do it.

Best of luck.

No problem! I had run into the same situation and just happened to figure it out by chance. Happy to help, the forums are awesome!