Fix iMessage sends as texts – Prepaid

Fix iMessage sends as texts – Prepaid ? iMessage seemed to stop working for 1 person after an iMessage failed and I chose to send the message as a text when clicking on the red exclamation mark. Nothing else had changed on either mine or my friends phones.

So I turned wifi off, and turned iMessage off in settings. Then I force quit the phone and rebooted. After reboot I then turned iMessage back on. The important I think is that I had to log back in to iMessage with my apple id and password. Once iMessage had been reactivated by signing back in the issue with the one contact had gone away, with it showing iMessage in the text input box rather than text message.

Obviously somehow my iPhone had decided that after failing delivery once and choosing text messag to apply this to all future messages. Hope this helps for anybody with the same issue!

Answer:

I ONLY want to send using iMessage and don’t want to send or receive any SMS message at all as I will be billed by my carrier. Occassionally, I still get billed for SMS by AT&T for $0.20 TXT or $0.45 for MMS.

This is what I’ve done to my AT&T iPhone 4S to prevent it from sending as SMS and get charged.

1. iMessage => turned on
2. Send as SMS => turned off
3. Tried sending messages using their email address instead of phone numbers
4. Verified the other party is also using iPhone 4S on iOS5.1.1 on the same AT&T network
5. This happened when I have 3G(4G) as well as even Wi-Fi.
6. Did reboot, hard reset, network reset before.

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