I dont know if anyone has an answer to this..

She can actually reply to the email and the reply will be sent to you in world as an IM.

but only if you haven't logged off (regardless of having logged back in again or not) since between the time you sent the msg and she tried to send the reply, and I think there are a few other conditions, not sure

Uh, no, at least it's not *supposed* to work like that. The reply address is supposed to be valid for 24 hours after the IM is sent, regardless of whether the sender logs off. If that's not working reliably, then... well... "situation normal" I suppose.

If you are talking about replying to an IM from your email, I thought it was good for five (5) days. If you aren't speaking of this then I am confused - please forgive....

Thanks for understanding, this is exactly what is happening...I got a message from her at the start of September just letting me know that due to her RL being very busy at the moment, she would not logging in for a while...She has not cleared her profile or left any groups, so I can assume that she will be back as soon as she can...She has always told me that SL is more of a winter thing for her, and as she lives in Italy with lots of fine sunny weather, she is very busy making the most of it, and her RL job is very busy too during the summer months...Roll on the winter!!!!!

ok, perhaps I'm wrong about the behavior of the offline IM replies, when I have time I'll try to remember to test this

I have experienced IMs continuing to go to email despite being capped upon logging in, especially when carrying on an IM conversation with friends via offline email the cap comes quickly!

I remember once someone complaining that their email address was revealed when they responded to an offline IM, and the recipient got it in their email (this was about two years ago).

So has the 'both offline' behavior changed?

They might have solved the privacy "problem" by simply stopping those emails instead of stripping the address perhaps?

The only time I've known IMs not to get through have been when you hear that familiar "ding" sadlyright as you are logging out...

Thing was, the reply to an inworld IM I received via Yahoo *used* to work up to a certain amount of time from when the original IM was sent. But now it just doesn't work at all.

However, Yahoo decided to "upgrade" and added new "features" I don't like at all. That was probably the death blow.

I'm still recieving IMs to my email to this day. I haven't been able to log in since last september.