IMessage needs to be enabled...

Question

From photo album I hit select and chose 3 pictures then I hit the box with the up arrow in the bottom left hand corner and hit Message. I type in the recipient and hit send but I get an error message that says: Cannot Send Message, iMessage needs to be enabled to send this message.
The thing is iMessage is enabled and so is mms. Also this shouldn't be going threw as an iMessage as it's being sent to a regular phone. I've disabled and re-enabled iMessage but it still wont go threw.
The reason I am trying to send pictures this way it because I can't select more than one at a time as for the other way it's one at a time.

Answer 1

I have a similar problem as the OP, I wished to disable iMessage just to avoid the complications of having two messaging systems. Also, I never use data and always keep it off in order to save battery. Third, I noticed that when using iMessage, sometimes others' messages to me reach me late, i.e. they would send it at 3 pm and I would receive it at 6 pm when I turned on my wi-fi (remember, I have data off always). For these reasons I chose to completely disable imessage.
However, for one of my contacts, I noticed that the "send" button was still blue, rather than green (as you know, green is for ordinary SMS while blue is for iMessage). When I try to send this person a text, I naturally get the "imessage needs to be enabled to send this message". I tried the solutions in this thread, but none of them worked.
However, I managed to find a workaround. First, I turned on iMessage, then I turned on "send as SMS if imessage not available" in the settings. Then, I disconnected my wifi and data so that imessage would not be available, then I tried to send an iMessage to the person in question (the one with the button stuck on blue). This time I did NOT get the error message, but the iMessage tried to send anyways, getting stuck when the bar was around 85% complete. Then, I pressed on the speech bubble being sent, and manually chose "send as text message"). Voila! the button suddenly turned green, and now I can send regular texts to that person again!