Some of my contacts are in green, some in blue and some in gray. The gray ones, I cannot send a text message to - never had this problem before. What is going on?

Gray contacts are those such as email or home phone #'s that cannot be texted.

FOr gray contacts you hve to edit them and enter number with country codes.

Some things to try. Delete the contact and any text conversations related to it and add the contact back. Reset your Network Settings. Settings>General>Reset>Reset Network Settings. This will delete any saved WiFi passcode but that's all.

I believe the meaning is:

Registered with iMessage - blue

Normal text - green

Not for texting - gray

What is the exact error message?

That's not true......... I have been texting to my wife for years......now, all of a sudden, her contact is grey and I can't send her files. Nothing changed, so what happened?

Yeah I just can't really look at his phone but I'll have to talk to him about it.

If you're talking about the number that show up in auto-complete when you start typing a number in messages, blue are contacts with whom you've exchanged iMessages recently, green are those with whom you've exchanged SMS messages recently and grey are people with whom you have not exchanged messages recently. If they are mobile numbers, you should still be able to message them. Are you saying you can't select your wife's number? What happens if you start the message from within your wife's contact page? When you messaged your wife before, were you using SMS or iMessage?

Short answer: blue ones have been sent or received using Apple's iMessage technology, while green ones are "traditional" text messages exchanged via Short Messaging Service, or SMS. I copied this from another site with the same question M

Novicemarkmitc wrote:

Short answer: blue ones have been sent or received using Apple's iMessage technology, while green ones are "traditional" text messages exchanged via Short Messaging Service, or SMS. I copied this from another site with the same question M

You could also have just copied it from the post I made in this very thread over two years ago with the same answer.

Hey so I had texted this contact before and it worked and he has a Samsung and now all of a sudden within the last few weeks his number turned gray and I can no longer text him. When I try to sent a text it says it could not be sent and to try again and when I try again it just happens over and over and over. Any ideas?

When I select the green ones, messages just crashes and disappears... I am not able to open messages from all of the green ones either with the beta iOS 10..

They're saved in the Message app's cache. I believe that, if you send them a message, you'd then be able to save the contact to your Contacts. You'd need to do it before they are overwritten.

Hi, I'm having the same problem, did you manage to solve the problem?

I've tried all the suggestions and more, but just can't send a text to this one contact, even though I used to be able to.