A few years ago I discovered that if you have a phone number and an email address in a contact in your iPhone, iMessage looks for other accounts using the email

A few years ago I discovered that if you have a phone number and an email address in a contact in your iPhone, iMessage looks for other accounts using the email address FIRST -- even though its ostensibly replacing SMS, which of course is phone number based. I found this out because someone accidentally put my email address in a contact (see: https://xkcd.com/1279/ https://xkcd.com/1279/) and then texted me to call out sick. After multiple attempts to explain that I was not actually her boss, she accused me of stealing the phone number. That was a fun day.