Background: Whenever I receive a text message from a person or entity I expect to encounter in the future, I make a point to add the sending phone number to my Contacts entry for the entity. In some cases that involves creating a new Contact card for them, whereas other times it means adding the phone number to those already present in the existing Contact card. I do this so when I’m browsing or reviewing text message threads in the Messages app, I can easily tell who’s involved without having to drill down into the actual thread.
Problem: I’ve run into some occasions where it’s important to ascertain exactly which phone # sent me a specific message, and I find this impossible to do within the message thread in Messages.
It’s gotten so bad that I’ve resorted to creating whole new Contact cards so I can limit each one to a single phone number. So I may have Contact entitled “Dr. Smith”, another named “Dr. Smith office mgr”, and yet another called “Dr. Smith reminders”.
This succeeds in keeping their respective threads separate and easily distinguished in Messages, but also clutters up my Contacts with otherwise extraneous entries.
Does anyone else have this problem, or know of a better way to accomplish what I’m wanting? Thanks.
It’s a little obscure, but if you tap on the person who sent you the message (the icon at the top of the message) it should bring up a panel that has an “Info” button on it.
Touching Info will bring up their contact pane which should have a tiny gray “recent” badge next to one of their phone numbers (or email in the case of Messages). That would be the phone number used to send you that message.
I’ve used that technique on email for ages, but didn’t think to try it with Messages.
So I just tried it, and it seems the “Recent” mark is referring to the phone number that sent the latest message in the thread rather than the one I had selected.
I’ll take it one step further. I can be reached a phone number and some email addresses. I would like to know which option the sender used to reach me.
Tap on the circle with the person’s image or initials at the top of the conversation. Underneath the square buttons for calling, messaging, etc there is a row that says ‘Conversation Line’ which tells you which number they messaged you on:
Huh. My Messages app doesn’t have that feature. It has the row of square buttons, but underneath that is either “Request location”, or a map showing their location if they have shared that with me. Perhaps it’s only available on later phones? I have an iPhone 13 Pro Max running iOS 17.6.
I realize that. Sorry for not being clearer. I was referring to the button for “Conversation Line” apparently only being on phones that have more than one number assigned.
In my experience, the originator(s) show up as separate senders as they send from different addresses … with Message then often declaring the messaging thread as “n People” (where n is some number). I.e., it becomes a multi-party (aka group) discussion.
Click on the “n People”, and it should show you the circles for all of them. Click on a circle of interest, and it should show you the information of interest. If it’s not already in your Contacts, down at the bottom of the info it will offer to Create New Contact or Add to Existing Contact. [Or, Block Caller.]
@MyBlueSky has been creating contacts for senders. But some senders send from many different phone numbers, so the contact cards end up with multiple numbers. And these senders sometimes use different numbers in a single conversation. He wants to know which of the numbers was used for each message.
So far, his only “solution” has been to create a separate contact card for each number, which (I agree) is a real pain in the neck to manage. There really should be a better way, but so far, nobody has suggested a good solution.
For iMessage I think it really doesn’t matter. Each Apple ID can be addressed by phone number(s) or email address(es) but it’s all the same account so it doesn’t matter which one you use. The sender chooses which number or address to send from, but when sending to they can be reached at any one of those numbers.
For SMS messages I believe that any number that’s different would be in its own thread.
I believe Scott is correct. All messages received in the Messages app from a single contact card, whether iMessage or SMS/MMS, appear threaded together in Messages. I see this on my Mac, my iPhone, and my iPad.
When you look for the Sender of an SMS message, if it exists, you’ll see a Contacts card containing that number – without indicating which was the last number used. I suspect this happens because Messages lumps all of the numbers of a contact together as it places their messages into a conversation.
When a new sender number shows up (that you haven’t yet put on a Contacts card), when you look up that Sender, you’ll just see the number. (With an option to add it to an existing contact or creating a new one; whichever you do, you’ll see that contact card next time you look for that number’s Sender. I recommend using that opportunity to determine how or you’ll want to distinguish between numbers.)
I take all Toyotas I’ve ever owned to the same rather large local Toyota dealership for service. They have a hug staff of “service representatives”, who send me text and email) using different phone numbers (and email addresses), with a lot of turnover. Years ago, I merged all those different Contacts for these folks (including some whose phone numbers duplicated the person they replaced, unknown by me) into o a single “Toyota Service” Contacts entry.
It doesn’t bother me that I can’t distinguish which of those many “Toyota Service” phone numbers last called or sent text … but they’d better say who they are in their message!
This works great if everybody sharing a contact is related, since all the numbers belong to the Toyota dealership (although I suppose some of the service people may be using personal cell phones to call).
But it fails miserably if you’re grouping together numbers belonging to different entities - like one that aggregates every spammer that has tried to contact you. If you need to know which one sent you a message (perhaps to report them to law enforcement), that aggregate contact card will come back to bite you.
