Incoming Mail Down and ROAM

It appears incoming mail on the grid is down again, or at the very least, running extremely slow. This has been affecting ROAM for the past 48 hours. If you are a subscriber of ROAM and are unable to use it at this moment it is due to the Second Life email server. If you would like a more personal and detailed explanation, please contact me directly in world, I will be more than happy to assist you.

Now with that aside, my real question. When are we going to have reliable email? This is a constant source of frustration for many projects.

Yes I know we have XML-RPC, I use that for many other projects as well, but there are many conditions, environments, and devices that XML-RPC is not suitable for! Especially since you need to re-register you for an XML-RPC channel EVERY TIME you change sims. The 255 character limitation is also very impeding.

Please give us reliable email! Email has been in use for decades and thousands of the top businesses in the world manage to keep it up and stable, why is it so hard for Second Life to maintain a stable server? A simple roundtrip email ping test shows how unreliable incoming mail is, outgoing can reach its destination within 1-2 seconds, and the receiving server can reply within 1-2 seconds, but it can take anywhere from 2 seconds to 2 days to have your response get delivered to an object! This is unaccetable in a real-time environment.

If Linden Labs is unable to solve the technical issues of it internally than why not contract or out source someone or a team of someones to fix it? I don't mean that as an insult, just a suggestion, sometimes it is better to bring in a professional. There are very qualified people who know how to setup stable email enviroments that can handle millions of messages without flinching, just look at the spam industry!

Frustrated Developer,
Rathe Underthorn

I noticed this both with ROAM and with sending pics to Snapzilla—not sure if the latter issue is connected but a whole bunch o' pics got in a logjam and then all spewwwed out.

I just received about a dozen IM-> emails that were totally out of order. I know for a fact that five or so of them were IMed in game much earlier today, yet they appeared in my inbox *after* some IMs that I know were sent later in the day. And the entire dozen or so came all at once.

If fixing this is a resource issue, put a bounty on it. Name the price. I will see towards raising the money to get this fixed. This is seriously stifling innovation.

Mail is back up. Thanks Mark Linden!

This problem will only get worse as SL grows.. Imagine a single object sending/receiving a message every 20 seconds, then multiply that by say 10,000 (if not more) objects.. that would be sending and receiving and processing 30,000 emails a minute. ouch. The only solution I can think of is having two-way xml-rpc calls to 'localhost' only.. then let a script on the local client handle the rest.. no DoS problems.

By "localhost" do you mean "the sim the script is running on" or "within SL" or "the client computer connected to the sim" or what?

For object-object communication, wouldn't simply letting objects recieve IMs be more efficient, since at least within the same sim it would avoid a trip to the network stack?