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I thought to jot down what others may only know by rumor. I refer you to the following two official documents straight from Second Life itself.
Second Life: Limits Second Life: Instant Message |
When you are offline, SL will store up to 15 messages, meaning IMs, inventory offers, group notices, group invitations. Anything else is thrown away. WARNING: Some people say send them a notecard because their messages are capped but the default is everything is capped, including notecards which are inventory offerings. But you can change this. Note: Premium accounts have up to 80 messages stored.
autoAcceptNewInventory
If autoAcceptNewInventory (debug setting) is set to TRUE (the default is FALSE), then all inventory offers, even above the cap allowed by membership, go directly to inventory and do not count against the cap on offline messages.
I repeat: Notecards are inventory offerings. The default is to cap messages at 15 so Notecards will be thrown away unless this debug setting is changed.
ATTENTION: After I had changed this debug setting, somebody sent me a texture. I kept waiting for the button in IM chat "Accept" but it never appeared. I subsequently found the texture in my texture folder. It had been automatically delivered, no prompt to accept.
IM to email
When you have this set up, when you are offline, IMs are sent to the email address you've specified. Even if your messages are capped in-world, the transfer to email continues to work offworld. Personal note: I have had conversations while offworld, just as if I was in-world IMing back and forth.
IM to Email feature, which sends offline messages directly to the mailbox connected to your account. To activate it, go to Edit > Preferences (or press Ctrl-P), go to the Communication tab and check the Send IM to Email checkbox. Press Apply and close the window with OK.
Oddity
I've discovered that I can respond via email on my computer. I'm using Gmail. However, if I respond using my phone, a Google Pixel, the person gets an IM response from me but the message itself is blank. No text. For some odd reason, the SL servers get my response but are unable to transfer the text in the body of the email to an in-world IM. Obviously, this is a bug. But it's also obvious that the Gmail on my phone, a Google product I might add, is somehow different from the Gmail I use in my browser. My word of caution is to test this before you rely on your phone working properly. I would also test whatever other email system you may be using like Outlook to ensure it, too, is working properly with the Linden Lab servers.
IM to email: You have 5 days to respond
When you reply to the email, it gets sent back to the SL servers and converted to an IM and sent to the person. You have 5 days to respond after which, the SL server will give you an error.
WARNING: Most email replies include a copy of the original message. This can be messy for an IM. I ALWAYS hit Reply, type Ctrl+A to Select All, and delete everything so my reply consists of nothing other than my response. I NEVER send back a copy of the original message.
Personal note: When I reply from email, I always preface my reply with "(from RL email)" so the other person knows immediately I'm not in-world but responding off-world from email. I've had people confused, IMing back, "Where are you?", not being able to see me online, so I started doing this to ensure people knew I was off-world.
You can't start an off-world convo
You can respond in email to somebody else's IM. But you can NOT start a convo when off-world. You can only do that if you're logged in. I'm referring to finding a name and opening a chat in the chat window.
Off-world Convos
As I said above, throughout the day, I may receive an IM from somebody, that message appearing in my Gmail. I respond which goes back in-world to the person as an IM. From that point, the two of us can chat back and forth as if I was logged in. Like an informal chat when you're logged in and not face to face, I can chat with somebody throughout the day.
An Amusing Curiosity: The Multi-tasking Chat
Person A says something. A minute later, Person B responds. 5 minutes later, A says something. 10 minutes B replies. 30 minutes later, A says something else, and an hour later B chimes in.
This type of offline conversation can go on for hours, even lasting an entire day. It's a type of convo you have when you're multi-tasking, chatting with several different people at once, or when you are doing something else, only looking back at the chat window periodically. Has somebody given this type of convo a name? So far, I haven't seen anything, but I can informally call it a multi-tasking chat. I've had a few times when I've said hello to somebody when they were AFK and had them respond hours later, and even a day later. Ha, ha!
Final Word
That's my summary. Let me know if I've missed anything. I repeat: In this virtual world, we never touch, I mean physically touch, so communication is all we've got. Nevertheess, with our words we can connect so let's make sure the other person gets our words.
All the best to you in your worlds (plural: SL & RL). :-)
Post-script
When I receive something, a texture or a notecard, I'm used to seeing in IM chat a button "Accept". With automatic delivery to inventory, I don't get that. Several times now, I'm chatting with people and they've told me they've sent me a picture (a texture). I'm waiting for the Accept button when they ask, "Did you see my picture?" I suddenly realise I need to check inventory, and sure enough, there it is! Obviously, I need to get used to this paradigm shift.
However, a friend brought up the possibility of malfeasance. Somebody could send me an object and unsuspecting me could open it, activating its evil code. Just now, I did some Googling and turned up a few articles about hacking and Second Life. I have to assume that like RL, anything is possible. I'm not sure how much money there is to be made hacking my account but I can see a hacker may enjoy the challenge of doing so and making a fool out of naive me.
Post-script #2
I found not getting an "Accept" button to be disconcerting. I've changed the Debug setting and am now back to the default.
2023-11-23
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