With iMessage turned off, will I receive messages once I turn it back on?

All my friends and I have our iMessage Caller IDs set to our email addresses on our phones and other devices. My question is, if I've started an iMessage to a friend via our email addresses and in the middle of the conversation I decide to turn off iMessage for a little while, when I decide to turn iMessage back on, will it deliver the messages that my friend has sent me during my iMessage hiatus?

I guess I already know that answer to my own question, and that is, "no". My brother and I have tried it and the only indication that I never will receive his message is that on his end in iMessage it will never say "Delivered" underneath the message. It will be blue, indicating a connection with an iMessage participant, but it will never say delivered and I will never receive it when I turn on iMessage again.

It seems that it is lost in space forever.....on Apple's servers?

This problem only occurs when using iMessage to contact a recipient using their email address and not their phone number, since the message will be resent as an SMS if the recipient has iMessage off.

Thoughts?

Yes, I know that between wifi connections it will work, but what I am asking is between turning iMessage off and on. You know what I mean?

Yeah, the main issue is actually with a Group Message my friends and I have going. One of our friends doesn't want to get constant vibrating alerts informing him of all of our inane conversations throughout the day, but he wants to be able to receive text messages from co-workers throughout the day.

The problem is that if he turns iMessage off for a couple of hours, so as to avoid the bombardment of messages from me and my friends, when he turns it back on he wants to read what we've all been saying. But he doesn't want to lose iMessage functionality with his co-workers.

Currently we are having an epic battle between using iMessage or Beluga. If iMessage had ways to name Group Message chats and ways to only turn off specific Group Messages (for a short time and then have the messages all push once you turn that Group Message back on like Beluga does) then we would be using iMessage all the way.

As it currently stands, Beluga is just better for Group Messaging.

vettori said:

If he turns off iMessage he can't iMessage his co-workers. What you're looking for is different notifications for text coming from different people.

Click to expand...

Yes, this is exactly what I'm looking for. The problem isn't that he can't receive texts from his co-workers, the problem is that he can't get all of our Group Message iMessages when he turns iMessage back on after the work day.