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Comment by tdfx | Hacker News Reader

I wish the addressing mechanism of iMessage was more clear. If I send someone an iMessage from my Mac, does it show up as from my email address of my Apple account? Is the phone number of my iPhone automatically registered as an iMessage-eligible recipient when I set up my Apple account on my iPhone (currently doesn't appear to be).

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What Apple has done is merge all addressed/phone numbers of an AppleID into one. If you send a message with Messages on you phone, your side of the conversation will appear in the thread on your phone/iPad/etc. They are one now.

So, people can iMessage you at any of the identifiers attached to you AppleID and it will be sent to all locations.

Sucks for me since I give my Google Voice number to everyone and there's no way to register that with Apple AFAIK. So all my iMessages to peoples' phones show up as from my email address that's tied to my Apple account, which very few people have in their address book, or my actual AT&T cell phone number, which absolutely no one has in their address book.

Is this correct? I have sent and received iMessages on my phone but they do not appear on my iPad or my Mac. I wish it worked as you described, but it doesn't seem to be.

agreed. this was the first thing I tested after upgrading to iMessage on OSX this morning

working for me on my iPad, iPhone and Mac. Notifications are dismissed on all other devices once it's being read on either one of the devices

Except it doesn't work quite right. My friend and I both have iPhones and iPads. If I send her a "text" from my iPhone, sometimes it ends up on her iPad, if the last place she sent me a message was from her iPad, and vice versa. This results in missed messages both ways. If iMessage delivers a message, it should deliver to all registered devices for the user. The process is so opaque that you can't really see what it's doing to try to get it to work right. In that sense, it's kind of like Siri, the concept is the right one, but the execution sucks.

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