IM-to-Email stopped? A plus may be a minus!

I use gmail.. it's a pretty cool service, but one of the neat features of gmail, is that you can add a sort of "virtual rider" to your email address, by using the "+". For example, if your email address is:

jane1234@gmail.com

You can sort of "pre-sort" all the emails that come from secondlife.. by giving secondlife THIS email address instead.

jane1234+secondlife.com@gmail.com

The emails will still show up in your jane1234 mailbox, but you can easily filter all emails that contain "secondlife.com" in the "to" field.

That's a pretty cool feature, as I say.. but sometime yesterday, something bad happened. SL discarded my "+". This meant that all my emails were being sent to the nonexistent "jane1234secondlifecom@gmail.com" address. (again this is just an example, that's not my email address, duh).

I've filed a support ticket, because it clearly worked as-of 6:45am 2/7/2009... (that's the time on the last IM-to-email I received).. but for now, I've gone ahead and reverted to an email address that the system is going to accept, minus the +.

Maybe no one's talking to you anymore. I woke up this morning to a box full of mail since last night. Might be just a glitch in your account ...?

Could be a glitch in my account.. but when I went to inspect my offline setting, I saw that the plus was conspicuously absent.. I tried re-entering the address with the +, but SL discarded it.

Unfortunately, I *KNOW* I'm getting offlines.. I'm getting so many that my IMs are capped within 3-5 hours of going offline. I log in, and I get a huge flood of them. IMs not going to email.. that's a major problem for my customers and my business.. because I really DO need to sleep some time! and all the IMs after the cap, are just getting lost forever.

As I say, I've definitely filed a support ticket, to try and get the matter solved, we'll see if I continue not to get offlines in email.. if so, then the + issue may just be a red herring. But it looks like a likely culprit to me.

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Update: with the new (non-plussed) email address, a test offline-IM did indeed arrive in my email inbox within about 2 minutes.... So the plus seems to be involved.

Darn - I wonder who is going to get all those spam emails I thought I was sending to you.

:0 plus-signs if i remember right, do not play/store well in sql dbs (probably other dbs too, it's an operator). be cautious using 'em anywheres important like that, email addresses...

i use '+' in a lot of my combo product naming, and then one day not long ago i did some renaming in my xStreet catalog, and found half of the plusses dropping out entirely. at least not a showstopper there for me, but a good reminder that it's not a 'wise thing to use' - at any time some lil' db code tweak could lose its proper parsing and whups, there go the plus-signs (and maybe even more).

:0 i'm not a pro-fessional, so my diagnosis should be taken with a few tablespoons salt (unless you have heart conditions ;0)

but p.s. also - there's occassions, often during grid update weeks, when my own im-to-email does not come through - only when i log in. seems to clear itself up in a day or two though; never had a chronic outage like others seem to sometimes report here... maybe wait a few days and see if it clears first before assuming anything about my prev. advice ;0

p.p.s. oh speed-reading this morn, sorry haven't woken up entirely yet. ;0 if you reentered it and it wouldn't take, then yah, sounds like a db-entry tweak happened recently and maybe you can't use that anymore. :\

You might be able to filter them just using the search string "im.agni.lindenlab.com" without needing to fiddle with the email address you give to LL.

Also, gmail ignores dots in the email prefix, so instead of using winter@gmail, you could use win.ter@gmail, without any plus signs.

You can search for win.ter and find just the messages that come that way, so perhaps the filters work the same way.