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> By buying my mother a gift, I have now made it so that her contacts with iPhones, who all have her email saved, will – by default – send her messages that she
by gnicholas 3y ago
> By buying my mother a gift, I have now made it so that her contacts with iPhones, who all have her email saved, will – by default – send her messages that she cannot access on her phone, and they won’t know that they’re doing this when trying to text her.
I guess other people are likely different, but I hardly ever populate a contact with email addresses. Almost all of my contact cards have a phone number, and possibly a mailing address, but no email. I am more likely to put down family relationships or notes about how I know the person (my kid's friend's parent, for example) than I am to put in an email address.
This doesn't mean that the behavior that he describes, where messages are routed via iMessage to an email address instead of SMS to a phone, is appropriate. But it seems a bit extreme to claim that "her contacts with iPhones, who all have her email saved". I would imagine that a 60 year old woman (I'm guessing at her age) is not super likely to exclusively be friends with people who enter emails for all their contacts.
- thomastjeffery 3y agoThat's because you are sharing contacts the hard way. I usually do the same, but ideally the process is automated enough that you don't need to type any of the contact details. In that case, the email should be automatically included with the name and phone number.
- cesarb 3y agoI'd like to learn about these ideal ways. The most usual way to share a contact I know of, other than typing its details by hand, is by forwarding the contact through WhatsApp, and then it still wouldn't have the email because it whoever originally created the contact typed the details by hand (and included only the name and phone number).
- gnicholas 3y agoFor me (GP), I create a contact card after getting someone's phone number, and I just enter their name. I don't really need to create a contact card with email addresses because I can just search my email application for their name, which is almost always in their email address. Phone numbers, on the other hand, are obviously not searchable in this way. I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one who's 'doing it wrong'!
- thomastjeffery 3y ago> and then it still wouldn't have the email because it whoever originally created the contact typed the details by hand (and included only the name and phone number). That's the tenuous assumption you are making here. Lots of people put their email in their contact info: why not, if there's a place for it?
- kixiQu 3y ago(Author here, a woman.) Different strokes for different folks, I guess - she's involved with a couple of organizations that over the peak of the pandemic used videoconferencing software heavily, so everyone needed each other's emails for that. Plus another organization that just runs via email AFAIA. (I'm not saying she's the absolute hardest-hit by this kind of thing; e.g., some of the volunteering she does where this failure mode would be catastrophic is fine because those contacts reach her via WhatsApp.)
- gnicholas 3y agoSorry for the incorrect assumption, and thanks for replying. I use email a ton also, in a lot of different contexts, but I've never needed to match up email addresses with contact cards, for whatever reason. I could see this becoming more common now that Apple is making it easy to share selected info with a nearby phone. I suppose I'd share my email address under those circumstances, even though I wouldn't normally spell it out for sharing with someone.
- RulerOf 3y agoEmails ending up in a unified contact is very common. You sync with Apple or Google or whoever and they generate contacts then dedupe on the device for a unified list that contains all of the contact methods.