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Why does iMessage randomly send as text instead?

Group iMessage with all recipients using the correct settings. Receive at/caller id both set to email address, send as sms set to off. One of the members of the group will randomly have his blue iMessage input box turn green to text message. When this happens, his phone will instead send the message from his @mms.att.net text address to our email inbox. All of us have each others phone/email saved properly in the contact information as well. The group message on his phone looks unaffected minus the change from blue/green between iMessage and text message, but on the other hand the rest of us are getting our inboxes flooded with all of this messages via email. With the group set up through all contacts email addresses, and send as sms set to off by each recipient, the iMessage should ideally never turn green to text at any point. This has been tested with all members on 3G, and even with all of us at home on Wi-Fi as well. The only problems I've been able to find from searching seem to be when people don't have all of their settings correct. I've used one situation from tonight as an example, but it has been known to happen here and there with no explanation. Has anyone else experienced this yet?User uploaded fileUser uploaded fileUser uploaded file

iPhone 4, iOS 5.1.1

Posted on Aug 20, 2012 6:17 PM

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62 replies

Aug 22, 2012 9:56 AM in response to XMasta19

Just to add in detail, this is not a group message specific problem. It happened to me this morning on an individual iMessage to one recipient. Both of us have caller id set to email address, and "Send as SMS" is set to off... thus it should not default to a text message if either of us were out of service, which is not the case considering we're on Wi-Fi.

Aug 22, 2012 10:42 AM in response to XMasta19

Also note: all users are on the most current software version. Considering this also happened to me today via a normal iMessage conversation, I'm leaning towards the issue not being an individual device situation. This seems to be more on the server end with Apple if the problem occurs on multiple phones by various users. Any other ideas?

Aug 22, 2012 11:17 AM in response to XMasta19

From iPhone user guide...


http://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/iphone_user_guide.pdf:

Sending messages to a group

Group messaging lets you send a message to multiple recipients. Group messaging works with iMessage and MMS (not available in all areas).

Note: With MMS, group messaging must also be turned on in Settings > Messages, and replies are sent only to you—they aren’t copied to the other people in the group.





This is why I was stating the difference between the two, even the iPhone itself changes the name at the top of the group depending on whether it's being sent via text message or iMessage. The group part is not the important detail though, it's the fact that an iMessage only conversation still manages to somehow get switched to text message format. When this happens, we're emailing each other from the mail address of our phone numbers as shown in the screenshots.

Aug 22, 2012 12:40 PM in response to KC7GNM

If that were the case, you should instead get an error message stating that the recipient is unavailable to receive iMessages at the time. That's the point of turning off the "Send as SMS" option, so that you don't use text messaging at all during an iMessage conversation. In our scenario though, this has occurred even when both/all members are connected to a strong Wi-Fi network at home/work. The person that was first having the issue even has the AT&T M-Cell connected at his house. This would ensure he has excellent cell network reception, if for some reason his Wi-Fi was having intermittent problems. I'm not attempting to be difficult or play devil's advocate, but I wouldn't have created this discussion topic if I didn't first do my fair share of research on the matter.

Why does iMessage randomly send as text instead?

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