iphone 4 not calling/creates phantom email!

Hi, Not sure how to describe a problem recently experienced on my wifes' iPhone 4 but I'll try...

For one contact when she tried to initiate a call, instead of calling the contact the SMS screen came up waiting for input. She cancelled and tried repeatedly with the same result. We tried deleting the contact number and re-entering but the same thing kept happening. Eventually solved by deleting the contact and keying name and number in from scratch. We noticed at this point that whereas the new number had a space automatically appear after the area code (we're in the UK - so that's after the first five digits), on the misbehaving number the space was not there.

Later, on loading her email my wife found ten blank messages sent from her iphone with that miscreant number as the subject!

Any ideas as to what was going on?

I had this same problem and eventually realized - after following your advice to delete and re-enter, but I only deleted the problematic phone number not the entire contact- that I'd entered the home phone number in an email field, not a phone number field.

Which explains why the contact's cell number worked but not the home number.