IM Delivery "capped"

I've been offline for a week with computer problems and finally got to log in tonight. I have a message "too many instant messages. delivery capped."

And I have no IM's.

Does this mean that every IM that has been sent to me for the past week has been dumped??

If you've got IM->email turned on, every offline IM you got was emailed to you, except for the two days last week when that was broken. Also, I seem to recall that all the IMs will show up in the IM panel, but not on the main chat display -- again, except for the two days when offline IMs were broken.

I do not have email IM turned on, although had I been able to log into SL after the crash that killed my CPU, I would have turned it on so that I could get those IM's while offline during the repair.

No IM's show up in the IM panel. It's would appear that I did not get a single IM in the week I was out, however there was a message in chat window when I first logged back in "too many instant messages. delivery capped" which I can understand. What I don't understand is why there are no IM's in the IM panel and once that panel was full, why weren't further IM's returned as undeliverable?

Right now, it seems that everything was simply dumped.

There was a bug with offline IMs earlier this week. I'm not sure what all was hit by it.

On a mostly on topic note, has anyone ever actually tested to see how many IMs it takes to hit the cap? It's probably another one of those 'out of a hat' numbers, but I've never taken the time to find out what it is.

I suspect it's 32 offline messages of all types, but I haven't verified this.

It happened to me again after being away for 2 days (with still more computer trouble).

This time, though, I think I have it figured out. My visitor counter sends an IM to report vistitor traffic. My IM delivery was capped after 24 IM's from the visitor counter.

So, the magic number is probably 24.