imessage sends to email not phone number

OMG. I’ve been having this same problem. My friends who also have iPhones don’t have this issue. I hope someone can tell us why this is happening. It’s annoying to always go to a non iPhone contact and have to select message. Yesterday I sent a message to someone ‘s landline

The problem also occurs when sending from iPhone to iPhone with iOS 10.2.1 and earlier iOS's too.

1. Send a simple text iMessage from an iPhone to a phone number for another iPhone (blue text).

2. message is delivered as an email to phonenumber@att.com where "phonenumber" is the numeric phone number for the iPhone. The same thing occur to @verizon.net. Because this glitch occurs (seemingly at random) for more than one carrier, it seem likely that there is an intermittent bug in Apple's servers.

3. It's not an iMessage to SMS issue. It happens with iMessage to iPhone from one user to one other--and the sending phone recognizes the receiving number as an iPhone.

This glitch is a particular problem for a family member who is dyslexic and depends on software to read messages as audio. The email formats in a typeface that is both too small for the human eye to read and the text to audio app can't read it either. :-(

krustyfur wrote:

I just upgraded my iPhone 5s to a 7+. Before the upgrade, I had iOS 10 on the 5s and messaging behaved as normal.

On the new phone however, if I go to send a text message to someone the ONLY option is to their email address if I have one in their contact list, otherwise the phone number shows. So when I send a text to a friend on an android, it emailed him with the return path as the SMS email address thing @att. It didn't show up in his messaging app, but in his email. Not cool.

It wasn't until he texted me that I could send a message directly to his phone.

I tried deactivating iMessage and reactivating it via message settings. Nada. Everyone else in my contact list only shows up as an email address in the message app.

Why can't I just send a text message to a pWho/what do I have to sacrifice under what phase of the moon to get this thing to work as it used to?

Why don't you ask your phone carrier why... SMS/MMS is a carrier feature.

You can't send an imessage to an android only to other Apple devices.

Have you tried writing their number in the recipient field, instead of their name?

I did not mean to imply that you should need to do it. Hopefully, if your issue is a bug, it will be squashed quickly. But in the meantime, perhaps it is more convenient for you, if it turns out to work, to type their number than to have to wait for them to send a message first.

I was simply trying to help.

Best of luck!

Murph,

I've been having the same issue.....have you since found an answer/solution?