Hello from Enchanted Alice! Be prepared to fall through a few rabbit holes, but you will be rewarded with the most beautiful waterfall ever built in Second Life. I’m amazed it was built inside a skybox! You have to come see the waterfall, it’s breathtaking.
Offlines is my favorite ways to chat with my SL friends when I’m offline. Anytime someone IMs you when you’re offline, the message gets sent to your email if you have it checked in your settings. Go to your SL Change Email Settings page, and make sure it is checked!
Sasy Scarborough goes into depth about Offlines to Email on her blog post, read all about it and never miss a message again. I often see creators or customer service reps. write in their profiles that their offline IMs get capped as a reason for missing messages, and I wonder why they’re not using Offlines to Email? Even basic users with only 15 offline IMs available, should be able to receive the rest of their offlines sent to email without missing a single message.
What is Offline IMs? When you are not signed on, these are messages that you receive when someone IMs you. When this happens, SL will keep up to 15 offlines in the chat/conversation tab for basic users, and 80 offlines for premium users. Let’s say 20 people send you messages that day, what happens? If you don’t have Offlines to Email checked, you will “capped”, thus losing 5 messages. If you have it checked, ALL of the messages will be sent to your email. However, when you log in world, you only see the maximum allowed by your account type. It doesn’t matter cos I almost never read my in-world messages, since I’ve already read and responded to them offline, via email.
If you use offlines, you should also create an email exclusively for your SL account. Why? Recently I discovered a bug when two of my friends responded to my offlines.
This is how a typical offline looks when you’re in-world and someone responds to you via their email:
This is a response to your offline! On Fri, Nov 15, 2019 at 12:12 PM Juicy Littlething < xz5csasfo2nebrafpvxkmixtug7f3hmwqijcfp4d@im.agni.lindenlab.com> wrote:
A few weeks ago, I noticed that when two of my friends responded to me, their offlines showed their Real Name (the name they have listed in their email account settings) and/or Email Signature after wrote:, which is typically blank.
Example of offline bug:
This is a response to your offline! On Fri, Nov 15, 2019 at 12:12 PM Juicy Littlething < xz5csasfo2nebrafpvxkmixtug7f3hmwqijcfp4d@im.agni.lindenlab.com> wrote: Real Name – Signature Info (included phone number)
I still use offlines confidently, cos I have an email exclusively for SL. I’m not sure if anyone else has ever seen this offline bug, but if you have, let me know in the comments!
What I’m Wearing:
- Truth – Ambience
- The Secret Store – Mimi Ruffle Blouse, Lula Cozy Shorts
- Ingenue – Lilith Flats (Pearl)
I am not a creator, have my offline messages go to my email, and still do not get 100% messages. This tends to happen if I do not log in for a while (let’s say longer than 12 hours). Sometimes I can be online, talking to someone, and something that they wrote will randomly go to my email instead of in-world. Also, there is a limit to how long of a message that you can respond to someone via email.
Creators tend to get tons of offline messages from groups or even from the scripts that they use to help manage their stores and/or sims. This is not even counting the number of times people will write, “Hello” or “Hi”, and then nothing else is said. I have told one person that I work for to please turn off a certain feature that was sending me offline messages, because 1. I was already getting the information in another way, on another email account and 2. I noticed that I was receiving limited SL information to my email once that feature started.
Some people may not have the time to sift through a lot of email messages, or to constantly check email. In most cases, people have other ways to communicate to their friends or colleagues if they are not on SL (e.g. Skype, FB messenger, Discord).
Sometimes when people say their messages go to their email, they will say send another message if if there is no response after x hours. I also notice the ones who like the offline messages, tend to organize their inventory in a way where note cards are easily lost. They do not check for new items every time they log in-world.
I do believe that more people should utilize the offline messages to email feature. However, if they feel that other methods are a more reliable way to receive important information, then so be it. I will abide by whatever method as long as I get a response in a timely fashion.
I like offlines cos I can read them on my phone while I’m working – I can’t read a notecard, LOL.