No iMessage with some users (they have iPhones)

[DominikHoffmann]

Is anybody else seeing this? As of about 4 PM EDT today I have been seeing issues with Messages on macOS 10.15.4. People I know to have iPhones are messaged via SMS from my Mac (with Text Message Forwarding turned on my iPhone). To others I can send iMessages without incident.

It’s either a bug in the new version of Messages included with 10.15.4 or something wrong with the servers. The person at AppleCare wanted me to start my Mac in Safe Mode and then do a NVRAM reset and reset the SMC, in that order, to troubleshoot beyond the enable/re-enable iMessage in Messages and the reboot I had already done. I have an important process running on my Mac that cannot be interrupted by a reboot, which is why I have not proceeded.

If others are seeing this, as well, there is of course good reason to assume that it is a bug or server misbehavior.

 

[chscag]

More than likely it's the overwhelming increase in message traffic. People are staying at home now and texting may be one of the ways they're staying touch with family and friends. It could also be your carrier's servers that are busy more than usual.

 

[DominikHoffmann]

It could also be your carrier's servers that are busy more than usual.

Not trying to nit-pick what you said. My understanding is that Messages checks with Apple first to see, whether a particular cell number is registered as an iMessage device and then sends out the message via iMessage. If not, Messages sends it as an SMS. Only when that happens, are the carriers’ servers involved. My problem is that the numbers aren’t coming back to my Mac as being capable of accepting iMessages.

Another thing that points to my computer being a problem is that I can still send iMessages from my phone to those numbers.

 

[k.alexander]

Seeing the same problem over the last week or two, but only with my wife, who's been in the same house (on the same wifi) all this time. Did you ever find a solution? I can force Messages on Mac to send her an iMessage if I start a "new" conversation with her (although it luckily goes into our old/previous thread) but after a few minutes, and clicking away and back to that conversation, she becomes a green bubble again.

 

[DominikHoffmann]

I finally called AppleCare. They had me log out of and back into iMessage, reboot, do a safe reboot, reset the SMC and do a re-install of the OS from the recovery partition. In the end, the last thing helped.

 

[k.alexander]

Yeah, there's no way in hell I'm re-installing the OS because of this stupid little bug. Hopefully will work itself out eventually, maybe with one of the incremental updates.

Did you do your re-install on top of the current OS? Did you lose anything, have to redo anything after the re-install? Still not doing it, but curious.

 

[DominikHoffmann]

I made a clone of my system with SuperDuper! and then reinstalled the OS on top of the current OS using system recovery. Once that was done, everything was back to normal. I did not have to reconfigure anything.