Strange Contact Link Issue

[Dbl_Tap]

I searched and couldn't find this issue.

My employee called and left a voicemail on my Vonage business line which automatically emailed me a notification and a text message.

If you're not familiar with Vonage's notification the email it sends you looks like this:

[email protected] (the first part is the person's phone number).

Ever since then I can start a new text to my employee and it will go through and the conversation in the SMS menu looks normal but as soon as he replies to me it then switches from his info to the [email protected] and if I reply in that thread he won't get it.

If I start a new message I can send him one again and as soon as it is sent it merges with the original conversation thread and switches it back to the normal looking thread but again as soon as he responds it switches back again.

I've searched the phone for the [email protected] and can't find it referenced anywhere. I tried deleting the call log and still nothing. I've looked under contact history and can't find [email protected] for him or Vonage.

It's driving me nuts. Anyone have any ideas?

 

[cyan]

Workaround for this issue

So I had the same EXACT problem and it was driving me crazy. Here is what was happening:

1. Someone would make a call to my home phone (which uses Vonage)
2. My Vonage account was set up to send me a text message letting me know I had a voicemail
3. The text was sent in the following format [email protected] (where the x's represent the phone number of the person who called)
4. If that phone number represented by the x's was in my list of contacts, Android would somehow link [email protected] with the contact in my phone book that has that phone number
5. When I went to text back to that person, the phone would automatically try to send the text to [email protected]
6. As a result, someone could initiate a text to me (and I would get it) or I could initiate a text to someone (and they would get it and could respond - which I would get) but as soon as I tried to respond to the person, the vonage address ([email protected]) would take over and there was no way to tell the phone to text a different address for that contact (unless I started a completely new text message thread).

I was on the phone with Verizon tech support for almost an hour last night and the guy completely understand what was happening but had absolutely no clue why. If you search EVERYWHERE, you will never find the [email protected] associated with any of your contacts (other than in the text thread). The guy could see from the logs that my phone was trying to text [email protected] and that's why the other person wasn't getting any of my response texts.

The solution:
1. Go to your vonage account and remove the option of "Text to Phone" for voicemail alerts. You can still get email alerts but text alerts will eff up any contact that you have in your phone book (and need to be able to text to reliably)
2. Do a hard reset on your phone. Seriously. It's the only way to remove a contact's association with the [email protected] address. You'll have to go through the whole process of re-activating your phone. I know, it's insane but thankfully, this works and the process is relatively quick if most of your stuff is on gmail (contacts, email address).

The strange thing about it is that this only started happening recently (within the past month).

Hope this helps. I signed up with this forum for the express purpose of explaining my experience and how it was fixed.

Good luck!

 

[tedwill]

I found a solution that fixed this problem without rebuilding the phone at [Q] Android Contact/SMS metadata?? - xda-developers. The fix was on an LG phone, and I just used it on my Samsung, so hopefully it will work on your Droid.