iMessages missing or sent to wrong recipient

Within the last 24 hours several iMessages have not been delivered or have been delivered to the wrong recipient. Example - a message sent to an Android user was received by another family member, an iPhone user. The reply from the iPhone user came back to me, in the original Android user’s message thread on my iPad (and iPhone).

Today my messages are sent and received correctly with an iPhone user, but the Android user is not receiving my text messages. I deleted the entire “old” message thread to/from that Android user on my iPad and iPhone. Text messages sent by the Android user are received by me normally.

Does anyone have suggestions for troubleshooting or correcting this?

edited to add: Apple System Status report indicates a brief iMessage problem yesterday (7/23) from 5:18 to 5:37 pm, but resolved now. That would not explain my problems

Thank you, will do. On iPhone and iPad go to Settings > Messages > iMessage (toggle off) - is this correct?

Not sure what to do in macOS, though. Should I launch Messages, then go to Preferences > iMessage tab > then deselect “Enable this account”? I’m asking this because there are two check-boxes (“Enable this account” and “Enable Messages in iCloud” directly under “Apple ID: my-AppleID”. I don’t want to make the mistake of signing out of iCloud. I want to be sure that I would be de-selecting the iMessage account, not signing out of iCloud completely.

Not sure if this is the issue, but sometimes contacts get their identities jumbled together. Usually it’s a third-party app and a bad keystroke on my part, but sometimes one person’s phone number or email will get listed on another person’s contact card.

It also works in reverse – sometimes one person can become two by accident. Case in point: yesterday when I looked for how far along my wife was on her commute home from work, I asked “Hey Siri, where’s my wife?” It said she wasn’t on my “Find my Friends” list, when she most definitely is. Turns out when she shared her location data with me, it came through with her email address as registered with Apple, which contains an inconsequential dot in the address. I have her contact card with that same email address but no dot. Once I fixed it, the Apple ecosystem recognized who she was and everything was good again. All because of a dot in the contact card.

1 Like