No Text Notifications or Sounds from One Contact

So this is an issue that I’ve had for a few months: On my iPhone 7, currently running iOS 11.4.1, I’m not getting any sort of notification from one specific contact in my phone. No ringtone, no vibration, no banner on top of the screen, no blue circle next to their name in the Messages screen, not even a noise when I’m IN the conversation and they send a text. Basically it’s as if I’ve already READ the text.

And I know the first answer is going to be “Turn of Do Not Disturb for that person”; that’s not it, I’ve done that so many times it’s not even funny. I’ve changed the text tone to default and changed the default, I’ve turned on Emergeny Bypass, I’ve deleted a huge amount of texts/attachements from them, I’ve deleted the contact all together, I’ve power cycled my phone more times than I can count, and I’ve completely reset my phone once; nothing has worked.

This is probably a good time to mention that when this problem started, there were TWO contacts that had this issue, but, by some sort of miracle, one of them started giving me notifications again... and I did absolutely nothing, they just randomly came back, and this was a couple weeks after I completely reset my phone and straight up deleted their contacts.

The only thing that I can possibly think is that there are too many messages in the conversation. I have Keep Messages set to Forever and this is the one person in my contacts I text the most, so there’s A LOT. But at the same I’m not quite sure. Like I said, I deleted a TON of messages, and actually switched my Keep Messages setting from Forever to 2 Weeks, so that must’ve deleted hundreds... still nothing (and I changed it back to Forever) And just today I realized I had a good amount of attachements I hadn’t deleted (about 400, yes I know absurd), so I got rid of them... still nothing. So I’m just completely stumped.

My only saving grace is that, for whatever unknown reason, the technological gods decided that I can get their notifications through my Series 1 38mm Apple Watch. If I don’t have it or it’s not charged, I’d never know they’d sent me a text.

The only thing I haven’t done is delete the conversation all together and... we’ll id rather not, for personal reasons, but if I don’t get anything that works then I’ll do that. So if anybody has ANYTHING that might work, it would be greatly appreciated.

My moms friend had this problem also and we ended up doing searches and found that my mom was listed 4 times in different apps and she deleted them all and put it in again in contacts and it worked. If you go to messages for example and pull down on screen you can search. So it might be entered into several apps. If you pull up more than one then this could help. Just can't hurt to try it. Or if you go to iCloud.com Mail and Contact settings you can see if there is a rule.