Important: Protect your Email identity when replying to offline IMs

Howdy Folks,

Yesterday, a friend replied offline to an IM of mine using his Email client. Unfortunately, his reply included the Email header which also revealed his RL identity. As Lee Linden suggests below, the best bet when replying to an offline IM using an Email client is to DELETE THE ENTIRE MESSAGE TEXT and then type your reply.

Thanks, Lee, for looking into this (his message follows):

Hello,

Thank you for your inquiry. Second Life will send the entire first line
of an offline IM email to the other resident. If the person sending the
email fails to include a carriage return (or, in the case of most
webmail services, their email server uses bad carriage returns), this
"first line" may include the previous header and possibly their
email/contact information.

The easy solution is to simply delete the ENTIRE previous message when
replying.

Regards,

Lee Linden

Excellent Tip, Paolo!

You may find it safer to create a special anonymous account just for Second Life IMs, like a Gmail or Hotmail account. Make sure that your mail client doesn't add a signature to the bottom that contains personally identifying information.

i generally reply to people via email that i already know and trust. if it's somebody i don't know, i just wait until i'm inworld. the im pops up even though it was emailed.

yep this is so true, i have email addys that i sometimes use that contain first and last name or just last name..and i have already had people in world call me by my full name =\ so sadly im already aware of this.

I think this is especially true for Email clients such as Outlook that display original message data within the message body:

-----Original Message-----
From: Last, First
Sent: Monday, Feb 17, 2005 1:50 PM
To: Last, First
Subject: A subject here

So, my advice is to make sure to delete any type of automated reply-to header info displayed within the message body when replying to offline IMs.