Offline Communications?

Is there a way to send an IM to a friend in-game without bringing up SL?

I think it would be great to conduct business/pleasure by logging in to the SL web site. If not with anyone, then at least those in your friends list.

You can already see your friends online from the web site. How about letting them communicate as well?

My first thought was "one-way", but as I think about it, how cool would a Java chat applet be that let you talk to folks online!

-V

Once again it's time to plug my feature vote proposal, number 195: Jabber IM Gateway.

http://secondlife.com/vote/index.php?get_id=195

I write from my Yahoo directly into SL... short mess... as in the chatt box IN SL..

Or correct I answer IMs from” them” inside SL.. they have all a code for sender, from SL.. BUT I see them with AVA name when I get the IMs to my normal private mailbox in Yahoo...

Inside SL ”they” write to my AVA in the normal way... get an answer reciver not online..

You must of course write in the preffs page to where you will have such IMs sent further...

Right, but you cannot initiate communication from outside of SL. Someone logged in to SL must IM you, first, resulting in an offline Email (if setup in your preferences, that is). Upon receipt, you can reply to that offline Email for approx. 24 hours before the encryption key expires.

In the past, spam has been the main road block wrt chat client integration. I am all for a jabber-style interface, provided that it can inherit Friend/buddy lists from SL, and filter out uninitiated contacts without first establishing an explicit Friend relationship within SL.

PS: I did vote for your proposal

That's the main point of using Jabber and why I made that proposal. From the proposal:

"Create a gateway to allow Jabber IM clients (http://www.jabber.org/) to IM with users in-world. Integrating the Jabber buddy list with the SL friends list would allow spam-free communication from out-world to in-world and back. IMs could also be forwarded to a connected Jabber client instead of email. Jabber is a good choice because it is available on all platforms, allows secure connections, and is based on open standards."

Thanks for the vote!

Question -- can you send an unsolicited email to an object in SL that is monitoring inbound email?

If so, that would be a relatively easy way to initiate an IM converstion with someone in-world, assuming your object in-world knew their key.

- Jon

yes you can. you send the e-mail to <object key>@lsl.secondlife.com.



jester


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sounds great! i would love to be able to chat with an in world person if i could. and last i heard from a Linden, it was every 3 days, but that was several updates ago and it could be all different now. lol

I voted for this feature and I also asked if Linden Lab would make such an IM service outisde of SL at the last town meeting. The reply was that they were sure there were people (residents) who were working on a program... HMMM, so I suppose this means that LL is not working on it, nor are the contemplating on working on it in the future.

I have been wondering why there hasnt been such a service in SL since I got here.

Any scripters out there who are up to the task ???? Pretty please!

Okay, let me see if I uderstand this. Someone in-game sends an email. It will come from [email]object@lsl.secondlife.com[/email]. The email recipient can reply to it. In that case, the sender would need a running script that polled for the reply, and made it accessible (maybe that part is already handled).

Now, what object number is that? Is that the object number of the sender? Or the object number of a device used to send the email? If the latter, will that object number persist across logins?

I'm trying to figure out if an object can permanently receive external emails, or if it would have to be reset at each login. I suppose if you had a relationship with someone such that they wouldn't mind, yo could automatically send an email at rez, so that any time you are logged in, your correspondant could reach you.

I'm new to this. Is there a persistant object other than ones that exist on land?

Seems the more desirable way would be to have a server that received the email "pings" and kept track of the on-line "pagers" by user name. Of course, privacy would be an issue.

I think I've answered some of my questions...


This was straight-forward. The object does poll for incoming messages, and can make the content, sender etc. available in a variety of ways.


I haven't gotten this far yet, except to find that, not only does the object ID NOT persist across logins, it doesn't persist when crossing sim boundaries.


This actually still looks like the only viable approach. I can find out the permanent object ID of an in-game agent, but its not clear to me that a scripted object can poll for mail on their behalf. Instead, the scripted object must identify ITSELF (every time it rezzes, including across sim boundaries) to a central server. By sending notification of its ID and the ID of its owner, then external association could be made between the email object and the owner, so that external users could send (sort've) unsolicited email into the game.


Doesn't seem to be.

Bottom line is that ANY object ID can receive an email, but its not clear to me that an agent can be scripted to receive its own email, making the sending of email to an agent a pointless exercise.

Therefore, a means is required that maps the email object to an agent. Its a phonebook, more or less. I don't want to talk to "Vershana's phone", I want to talk to "Vershana". But I need to look up her phone NUMBER in order to do so.

Jump in and tell me what an idiot I am if I've missed the obvious!

Well, what I was talking about:

You rez a "server" object on your land, and leave it there. This object has a key (UUID), which does not change ever unless you move the server to a different sim, or delete it and re-rez it.

From the outside world, you send an email to [email]UUID@lsl.secondlife.com[/email]. You put the name of the avatar you want to send an IM to as the subject, and the contents of the email is the message itself.

The server gets the email, looks up the key of that avatar in its private name to key lookup table (or using a publicly available name2key service), and then sends an IM to the avatar in question. Included in this message is a piece at the beginning explaining that the avatar must look up the sender in Find or with their calling card to respond the first time.

After that, you will receive (if you have it set up) an email from the avatar with their response, which you can reply to normally.

- Jon

That is what I did, made a object with a script I made in it, and I can send an email to it, and from it send an IM to anyone...

As I hated having to run in game to IM someone, so now I send myself reminder notes, or IM someone...just that it usually confuses that person as they think I am online..lol

In my experience recently, these session keys don't expire even if they are not used (I've gone two weeks without replying to an offline IM and it still worked). I imagine that they are intended to expire, but nobody at LL has taken the trouble to do so or write something that will automatically do it.

This is actually a problem that has been bug reported because this is very susceptable to spam and spoofing (in my opinion this is a much bigger problem than the debate regarding the potential of spam from publicly available agent key lists). One could easily and anonymously spam the keyspace (which by this time is probably full of sessions). These messages would be received as IMs from a user the reciepient had previously offline IMed!

For now, you can use that session id as a means of communication from the recipient to the sender, but I wouldn't count on it always being available.

Ah!!!!! Enlightenment!

I was trying to devise a solution that an agent could carry with them (to be cute, probably made to look like a cell phone or pager) that would allow a non-land owning agent to get mail. Clearly none of the above solutions would solve that problem.

OTOH, a land owner could provide a service of setting up a public PBX for people to use so they wouldn't need to carry an object.

I'm sure that solution will work for many. Just not for me!

Thanks!

you can with the avatar key. When someone messages me offline I get thier avatar key so that I can respond back. If I save that message I can start a new conversation or reply to that one again weeks later.

That's not the avatar key, that's a session id (see my post above).

A session can only be initiated from in-world.

you might be right Ushuaia my msitake. I'll admit i'm noobish at this part of things.