IOS – iMessages sent from email address and not received by iPhone

I've found the best solution to these iMessage and Face Time woes is to just turn the service off, then back on again. That causes it to re-activate with Apple's servers, which should register your phone number as a usable iMessage sender.

The "Waiting for Activation" message suggests that this process wasn't completed properly, and/or there's some issue with Apple's servers. Try toggling it, and if it still doesn't work, try it again later, as it may be a server side issue that you need to wait for Apple to resolve.

This is simple to accomplish if you have an iPhone to associate your phone number with your Apple ID account. I'm not aware of any way to hack, trick or cajole Apple to add a cell phone number to an Apple ID other than it going through the normal activation process on iPhone only.

1. Activate your Apple ID - http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4268
2. Open iMessage on the Mac and in preferences, set the caller ID to initiate messages from your phone number instead of your AppleID email.

As you can see, it is allowed to add more emails to an Apple ID, but the adding of phone numbers happens when you activate things from a live phone account and SMS messaging verifies that the phone number matches the iPhone.

Once that's done, Apple is happy to let your Mac or iPad or phone "iMessage" from that telephone number.