email message for offline ims

when iming information to someone, i tend to be terse and type several short messages. when the person is offline, the system stores these until they log in UNLESS they have offline im forwarded to email.

what would be really nice, to me, is a feature that prints something to the effect that "this person is offline and the message is being EMAILED to them." this would avoid me spamming somebody with six or seven emails to tell them something i would've typed in one long phrase if i'd known.

Ohh, good idea. I've emailed people 5 or 6 consecutive 1-line messages before, and that has to be annoying. I know it is when I've recieved them.

How about this idea instead, for people who have offline-IM-emails turned on:

They receive an IM from player X while offline. System stores that IM. If another IM from player X is received within 5 minutes, store that new IM also and reset the 5 minute timer. When the 5 minute timer times out, email all the stored messages to the player. If the player logs in before the 5 minute timer runs out, pass all the messages on to them and clear them, instead of emailing them.

Receiving from different people would store into different containers so that you wouldn't get different people's IMs intermixed in a single email.

- Neo

I don't mind this, but I think it needs to be a toggle as to whether it explicitly tells them this or not.

If I have IM to Email on, I dont always WANT people to know I have IM to Email on. Because then I get people IM me an hour or so later and say 'I know you have IM to email. Why arent you answering me?' etc. They do this now, so I know they'll do it more if they explicitly get told I have it on by SL. So yeah, ok with the idea if I'm not FORCED to divulge that information.

But the system DOES tell you the person is not online, at least for the first time you IM them that session. (Repeated warnings would get very annoying if you were holding a longish IM-to-email live conversation with them...)

Wait... I see what you mean. A different message between just offline and offline-but-listening-via-email. Gotcha.

Not a bad idea.