iMessage confusion.

Hi all and Happy holidays,
I seem to have set up an iMessage account, and something odd happened:

I have been having an SMS and cell phone conversation with a tradesman. He sent me a text message which did not arrive on my phone, but popped up on my wi-fi only iPad.
My question is, why did it not appear on my phone?

I have an iPhone 5. When I look at the message set up on the iPhone, it lists my email address and my cell phone number. Although the email address has a tick next to it, my cell phone number does not.

If anyone could explain what might have happened, it would help me understand how iMessage is meant to work.

Thanks and happy new year

SMS messages can only go to phone numbers, but iMessages can go to either phone numbers OR email addresses, which may be where this gets confusing. The simplest thing is to check each device and see if the same list of phone numbers and email addresses are being used on each, or consciously choose to limit messages that go to some devices.

In this case, sounds like the guy sent an iMessage (which is not an SMS) to your phone number. So your phone didn't get it because you have your number unticked there, but your iPad did because you have it ticked there. You can distinguish iMessages from texts by their background colour; blue for iMessage, green for SMS.

Thanks Chas_m,
Although the cell phone number does not have a tick against it, it is greyed out, so I cannot put a tick against it?

Try the steps outlined in this support-forum message:

https://discussions.apple.com/message/23243722#23243722

That has now put a tick next to the cell number.
Let's see how it works out.

Thank you

chas_m said:

Try the steps outlined in this support-forum message:

https://discussions.apple.com/message/23243722#23243722

Click to expand...

Thanks for that link. I was working on this problem over Christmas Eve and followed some directions that were not as clear. It is almost working. This should help.