Why does it say send to email address instead of text message

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How To Unlink Your Email Address From Your Text Messages
Re-add Their Email Into Your Contacts
Ask Them to Sign Off
Change Your Own Settings

If your friends and family are saying you're sending them text messages from your email them something is wrong with your settings. This tends to occur when you purchase a new phone, or sometimes when you update your device. Luckily there is an easy fix. Here's how to stop sending messages from your Apple ID/email and send them from your phone number:

Open the Settings app.
Tap Messages.
Tap Send & Receive.

From here you want to send and receive messages from your phone number. Make sure you're not using your Apple ID for iMessage or to start new conversations. Only your phone number should be checked.

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How To Unlink Your Email Address From Your Text Messages

It always feels a little bit vindictive when my phone does something weird and confusing. Like, all I’ve ever done is love you and repeatedly ask Siri to look up obscure 90s celebrities, phone. And this is how you treat me? Even the most tech savvy among us will occasionally be betrayed by our most precious technologic possession. My initial solution in order to fix these common phone problems is usually to wait until the issue is so severe or annoying that I have to do something about it.

If you’ve found yourself past the point of no return, asking “Why are my texts messages coming from my email address?”, you are far from alone. In fact, almost 400 people reported that exact problem on one of Apple’s online discussion boards. Based on the dozens of pleas from people across the internet, ranging from desperate to furious, this happens pretty often and seemingly without cause.

Lest you think it’s the tech demons pranking you for taking forever to respond to texts, your text messages and email address typically get linked due to iMessage. It seems like this can occur more often if you use iMessage on other Apple devices like your Macbook or iPad. Thankfully, the solution is fairly straightforward:

On your phone, go to Settings.
Then, go to Messages.
Finally, click on “Send & Receive.” This will show any phone numbers and email addresses you have linked to the Apple ID connected to your phone.
Under “Send & Receive” you should see a section labeled “Start New Conversations From.” Make sure your phone number has a checkmark next to it.

Then, you should be free to text from your phone number as the phone gods intended.

If you’re still having trouble, one user on Reddit suggests logging out of your Apple ID completely on your device. You might also want to make sure you’re logged off iChat on your laptop or desktop if going through your phone’s message settings doesn't work. Another user on an Apple discussion board said the old “turn it off and turn it back on” worked for them. Also, can't go wrong with the my personal favorite “scream and cry.” While it won't fix anything, it will definitely feel very good at least momentarily.

What about if you're asking for a friend? But really. A similar thing can happen when you’re messaging someone else. One minute you’re on a text thread linked to their phone number. Then, their next message suddenly comes from their email address. If you don't want to ask them to unlink their phone number and email address, just add their email address under their contact info on your phone. You can do this by tapping their name in the message thread they sent from their email address. Then, select “Add to Existing Contact” and find their name in your address book.

If the problem was with your number, you can ask your friends to do the same after you reset your phone to stop sending messages through your email address. Otherwise, you might want to start chats in a new thread after you get everything sorted out. That way your messages are coming from your phone number instead of spread between two threads. Then, at long last, you will be able to send all your bitmojis and gifs in a consolidated thread once again.

Have you ever been texting with someone on your iPhone, only to have their chat randomly switch to a whole new contact? There you are, happily typing away, when all of a sudden you have to jump into a new message box that says it’s from their email instead of the main contact.

This minor bug in the communication system between iOS and OSX will happen either if you have a contact saved in your phone incorrectly, or if they haven’t switched from their “@me” account in iChat over to their phone without turning off the former first.

Thankfully, solving the problem is actually a fairly easy fix.

Re-add Their Email Into Your Contacts

The first way of getting things back in order is to simply add the sender’s email address into their main contact which has already been stored in your contact list.

To do this, tap their name at the top of the iMessage bar, which will take you to the linked email address’ contact card.

Tap the “i” icon in the top right corner, just to the left of the saved email. Once this is done, you’ll be greeted with a screen that will give you options to email them, set up a FaceTime call, or “Add [the email] to an Existing Contact”.

Tap this, and you’ll be brought to your contact list, containing all the other names currently stored on the phone. Scroll down to find the contact you want to add the email to, and tap in.

After you click this, you’ll be taken to their contact page, where the email will have already been imported into the first slot automatically.

After this switch is made, no matter if they’ve emailed you from their iChat account or otherwise, the name will always appear only as the contact you’ve saved it under and nothing else.

Ask Them to Sign Off

RELATED: How to Rename Group Chats in iMessage

Sometimes, people can accidentally leave their iChat on through OSX after they’ve already started texting you from their phone.

If at any point their laptop/desktop leaves sleep mode with iChat activated, the iChat username can take precedence, and your conversation will be converted over to their chat window instead of your text box.

To solve this problem, it’s as simple as asking them to check if their iChat is logged on, and if so, having them sign out. Once they’ve done so, the next text they send will automatically switch back over to their number.

The above window is an example of a user still logged into iChat, while the next example is what you’ll see as soon as the iMessage account is only open in one place.

Change Your Own Settings

But what if you’re the culprit who’s been making a mess of someone else’s text log with your own email flub?

RELATED: Why Are Some iMessages Green and Some Blue on My iPhone?

If someone is telling you that your email is showing up in their text log instead of the normal contact, there’s one setting you can check on your end which might be causing the trouble.

To find it, start by opening the Settings app, and then navigating to the “Messages” section.

Here you’ll need to scroll down to the “Send & Receive” options, which will show you all the linked email addresses, iChat accounts, and phone numbers are linked to your iMessage app on the phone.

In case it isn’t already, to get your phone number appearing normally again you have to set the option to “Start New Conversations From” your number instead of any associated emails that might be linked to an iChat account or otherwise.

Also note that as long as you’re logged in from this email on an OSX linked account, iChat will automatically hold on to that information as a part of your laptop or desktop’s credentials. The only place this information can be removed is from the iPhone you’re working from in the iMessage portion of the Settings application.