Apparently my new phone's messaging app has often been sending text messages as e-mails. If I have a contact with both a phone number and an e-mail address, the default behavior is for it to send an MMS to the e-mail address. This is not what I want! I recently learned that five different people didn't see my texts because my messages went to their e-mail address - and in some cases these messages went to defunct/unmonitored accounts. While sending a text to an e-mail address is entirely possible, I haven't actually seen anyone try to do that since... 2010?

So going forward, I'll need to verify that I'm sending SMS messages to a regular phone number instead of an e-mail address (or use a different messaging app). I suspect this is an issue with Samsung's default messaging app.

That's strange. does it give any indication of this before sending? you may need to change habits a bit.

The only indication it gives me is it tells me it's an MMS instead of an SMS. However, lots of text messages use MMS - including group messages and anything with images or other attachments.

Going forward, whenever I text anyone that has both a phone number and an e-mail address in my contacts, and I haven't texted that person yet on my current phone, I'll need to make sure I'm sending the message to their phone.

Of course, I could try a different messaging app.

for my phone usage, contacts are bare minimum: name, phone number, so I've never ran into this issue

very strange that they would default to emailing. if you peruse the settings, maybe you can change it there, if you haven't tried that already

text messaging is still a bit of a hassle after all these years somehow; for the rest of this year I can continue to use hangouts to send texts via my phone as well as any computer, but in 2020 they're replacing it with google messenger, which advertises that you can text via any computer, but your phone needs to be detectably online, and mine never seems to be able to maintain a consistent connection with the web app. strange how they're destroying a great functionality because hangouts as a buddy messaging service failed.