What counts towards the instant message cap?

I've had this come up about two times now, where I log in to between 1 to 3 instant messages coming my way, a bunch of group announces, and a few items coming my way. Then I see this... [[14:39] Second Life: Too many instant messages. Delivery capped.] (O.o)

One IM and I'm capped? (O.o) Are there other things that affect IM capping? The last time it was 3 IMs and now I'm getting confused... I hear about people with serious social lives balancing 10 IMs at a time and so and so forth... How can anyone keep up? (O.o)

=^-^=

Everything!
IM's from people, messages from objects, group announcements, inventory offers. Set them up to go to your email, and they'll usually all make it.

I have an alt that I sometimes go for two or three weeks without logging her in. She is in about 10 groups. I've logged her in and had to click through 15 to 20 group notices, the ever present group invites from total strangers (usually 1 to 3), and a few IM's. I've never seen the capped IM message.

Yep, add to that list friendship offers and group invitations.

Seems like I have mine capped more often lately, and I also changed viewers a couple of months ago, but don't know if the two are related. Are IM's capped server side or client side?

Easy: Little girls get a smaller IM buffer! Didn't you know, Immy?

Seriously, just enable email forwarding. Thus you never lose anything. Also, you may already prepare responses before logging in and then just fire them back. That's very convenient in my experience.

Yeah, I have Email on for just about everything. I was just shocked to see IMs capped at one message... That same person sent me a pile of pictures... I'm sure that explains the whole thing. (>_<

=^-^=

I have email forwarding enabled, and I still find that my IMs get capped if I am receiving a lot of IMs and group notices. I often drop all my groups for that very reason, especially when I have 3 or 4 writing groups I belong to, and they ALL send out the same group message at the same time! And I definitely drop everything when I won't be in SL for a while. It's the only way for IMs to make it through to my email without getting capped by group messages first. I'd rather receive the IMs.

When you send your IMs to email, everything gets sent to email. The cap only caps what you see when you log in. If you get 10,000 messages while you're gone, you'll have 10,000 messages waiting in your email, but only a handful in SL.

Group messages get sent to email, but they simply say that there is an attachment; they don't display the attachment (wouldn't be possible if it was an object or a landmark anyway, but often it is a notecard, and I cannot read it).

So when I do log back in to SL, I lose all those group messages that got capped, and therefore lose all the attachments as well. The only thing to do is go to notices of every single group I belong to and see what I might have missed. Pain in the neck, and sometimes impossible in terms of time, if I belong to 25 groups that are very prolific, and I've been gone for a week or more.

Are you sure that everything gets sent to email without being capped? To my recollection (and it HAS been a long time since it's happened, so I could be remembering wrong), I thought I was having a problem continuing to receive IMs to email after a very active few groups sent out lots of group messages daily and quickly capped me. That's why I have dropped all of the fashion groups I used to belong to.

You only have to check the groups that you got an email about, and you can often tell by the email whether or not you'd like to check the attachment.

I get all my messages, and that can be around 100/day. The big exception to this is that it only sends group notices to email if you would have seen the notice online. The group notices are a little wonky now and not all of them get delivered to everyone. The only ones lost while offline should be the ones that you would have missed anyway. Considering the recent history of group notices, it makes sense to check the important ones every week or two to see if there was something important you missed.