All of a sudden my fiancé’s iPhone was sending messages from her iCloud email account rather than from her phone number. I tried everything I could find to fix it, but ended up having to restore from backup in order to get iMessage working properly again.

A few days ago her sister’s iPhone was having the same problem and since we live a four hour drive apart from one another I had to try and find a solution that she could easily do herself. I came across this solution by Cammy Harbison on iDigitalTimes:

Turn both iMessage and Facetime off in the Settings Menu. Then in Settings go to General, scroll down to Reset then select “Reset Your Network Settings.” Once everything has reset, make sure you are connected to Wi-fi. Reactivate iMessage and Facetime. You should now be able to select your phone number as an iMessage sending option.

It worked like a charm and now my future-sister-in-law’s iPhone is sending iMessages from her phone number rather than from her iCloud email address. I wish I could have found this solution before pulled the trigger on restoring my fiancé’s iPhone, it would have saved me a ton of time.