IM delivery as email seems very erratic

Hello

Usually when I'm offline any IMs are sent quickly to my email account but lately it can take several hours for them to arrive. A friend has also noticed this problem.

Has anyone else noticed this erratic behaviour or knows what is happening in SL grid etc?

By the way my email account seems to be workng fine - its Yahoo.co.uk - and it receives emails from other sources promptly.

Also, the internal emails in SL - yesterday one of them did not arrive from one of our vendors - a rare occurance for us - fortunately the transaction went fine and appeared in my account.

Perhaps the two email issues are unrelated.

Thank you in advance

SL sometimes caches multiple messages, probably when they come in quickly from the same source, or there's heavy internal traffic.

additionally Yahoo has a habit or caching when emails come in quickly from a particular source, even if they aren't going to the same address.

could be a problem at either end, or both.

I've been in SL longer than this BOD and use Gmail and honestly never had any email issues, maybe switch to another email provider for a month or so and see what happens.

I swapped to Gmail because of the issue. Drove me batty when I used to use hotmail.. and that was assuming the IM emails would arrive at all.

I've definitely noticed a recent spate of IMs that don't get sent to email. Last week or so, absolutely. Sigh.

Thank you for all the replies - now that I know about the Yahoo issues it does seem a better solution to use Gmail or my own ISP's email account.

Note that even Gmail stupidly marks SL messages as spam, with no discernable pattern. At least with Gmail it ends up in your spam folder... Yahoo deletes a lot of 'spam' (i.e. website registration confirmation messages) without even sending it to your junkmail, which is absolutely unacceptable.

I just now counted 30 IMs from the Second Life that Gmail sent to my Spam folder over the past 3 days, which is about 1/3 my total IM volume over that time... which is worse than I even thought it was. *pulls out hair* Goddamit, let ME decide what's spam and what isn't!

EDIT: Also, the hours-long delays you mention are typical of my experience with Yahoo, and I have seen cases similar to yours where email from some sources will get to you immediately but other sources are severely backlogged.

EDIT 2: Out of anger I just did a bit of googling and in doing so learned how to make a Gmail filter that will keep Gmail from sending all my IMs to Spam. In the 'From' criteria, I just specified 'secondlife.com' and then picked the 'do not send to spam' option. Now, to see if it works...

The other day I was online chatting with a friend in IM... when a line of the chat from about 15 min prior was sent to my email. Apparently just that one line never made it into the chat. Sheesh. >.<

Had this happen quite a few times, leads to some awkward questions as to why I'm not replying.

I've noticed an increase lately in im's not going to email, I get them when I login though....I think!

Ooh- this happened to me last week. I think they might have changed the default setting in the client for sending IMs to email. I noticed I wasn't getting any offline IMs for 2 straight days, and then I remembered that I had just installed SL on a new computer two days before that. I went and checked the email forwarding setting and it was disabled, even though I hadn't messed with that option on ANY machine for 3 years.

it does, I noticed the same problem and came up with the same solution.

my only annoyance with gmail is the lack of folder options. sure you can search e-mails, but that doesn't help visual organization when you'd like to prioritize a certain class of emails, or deprioritize another. it makes workflow so much easier when you don't have to go out of your way to group certain topics. scanning for certain criteria breaks workflow. folders automate that and can present multiple groupings at once while still maintaining their individual focus. /rant

Doesn't the "labels" facility do that for you? I find it very useful.

Pep (and being able to tag each email with several categories even more handy!)

Also you could create an SL "Label" and set those emails to go straight there.

Pep (Don't get me started on the coloured stars in gmail . . .)