imessage while travelling

[cakebytheocean]

Hello Folks,

Last year I travelled from Canada to the US for a two week trip. During this time I got a data plan from Airalo on my esim and completely disabled my primary physical sim line.
Since my imessages were primarily received and sent from my phone number which is tied to the physical sim which was disabled imessage defaulted to using one of my email addresses associated with icloud to send and received imessages. Whilst this worked fine during my stay in the US when I returned to Canada and my primary physical sim line was reactivated imessage defaulted back to the sending and receiving from my primary line. However, some of my contacts were not able to receive my imessages and conversely I was not able to receive any imessages from contacts who were still trying to message me via the email address imessage defaulted to despite the send/receive being enabled for it.
Did I do anything wrong here that caused this mishap?
I'm travelling to the US again next week and would like to avoid this from happening again so what should I be doing different? If I use a secondary phone (pixel 4xl) for my esim and put my iphone in airplane mode and turn on/connect to wifi after that will I still be able to send/receive imessages from the main phone number connected to the physical sim?

Thanks for any tips/guidance.

 

[Fred Zed]

Hello Folks,

Last year I travelled from Canada to the US for a two week trip. During this time I got a data plan from Airalo on my esim and completely disabled my primary physical sim line.
Since my imessages were primarily received and sent from my phone number which is tied to the physical sim which was disabled imessage defaulted to using one of my email addresses associated with icloud to send and received imessages. Whilst this worked fine during my stay in the US when I returned to Canada and my primary physical sim line was reactivated imessage defaulted back to the sending and receiving from my primary line. However, some of my contacts were not able to receive my imessages and conversely I was not able to receive any imessages from contacts who were still trying to message me via the email address imessage defaulted to despite the send/receive being enabled for it.
Did I do anything wrong here that caused this mishap?
I'm travelling to the US again next week and would like to avoid this from happening again so what should I be doing different? If I use a secondary phone (pixel 4xl) for my esim and put my iphone in airplane mode and turn on/connect to wifi after that will I still be able to send/receive imessages from the main phone number connected to the physical sim?

Thanks for any tips/guidance.

Sorry can’t help you. But I hope I don’t have this issue when I return back to the USA. Currently in the UK using a local physical SIM card , sending and receiving iMessages and FaceTime no issues. Even though the local sim which is set for data and voice primary isn’t selected/associated as an iMessage or FaceTime number for me.

 

[BigBlur]

By "completely disabling your primary SIM", does that mean you took it out of your phone? I would leave it in the phone, but disable or turn it off in Settings. I think that will leave your number associated with your phone and allow it to continue being used for iMessage. Then when you use your e-SIM, do not activate iMessage with that, or at least uncheck it from being used to send/receive iMessages and FaceTime. I posted a response here for a similar issue that might give you a little more insight of how this works.

Or if you want, using two separate phones as you described should work as well. The main thing is that the number needs to stay associated to your phone.

 

[Fred Zed]

Since I don’t have my Foreign local sim associated with iMessages I find when not in Wi-Fi areas that iMessages is very slow to send or even fails as I believe and I could be wrong that it’s using T-Mobile free roaming speeds which are limited to 128kb?

Edit: it can’t be the case since my local unrestricted sim is the data line so surely it won’t be using the 128kb T-Mobile roaming line to send iMessages ?

 

[ian87w]

iMessage is confusing. Maybe try setting it first to "start new conversations from" your email in the settings? As long as you have an email connected to iMessage (usually your iCloud email), I believe it should just work. I could be wrong though, since I don't really use iMessage.