Email to IM question

I've been replying by mail to IMs forwarded to my email address for ages. Usually that works great, as the reply address remains the same for each correspondent.

I've had one person though where the reply address was different in all 3 forwarded IMs I received from her, and with this person my replies bounced. The bounce message said "This email to instant message session has expired."

In another case the reply addresses were the same, but one of my replies bounced anyway. In this case, the bounce message was "Target agent not found."

Could someone please explain what conditions must be met for this to work reliably? Also, why the reply address remains the same with most people, but changes with some?


Thanks,

Dylan

Hi Dylan,

I believe after an IM-to-email is sent and delivered to you, the session stays open 48 hours... so you have ~2 days to reply. The reason why it's comparatively short its because it's a huge amount of data.

In rare cases, I've noticed other glitches, but this is the general case scenario. The reply address should stay the same during the same session, it's normal for it to change after that session's expired.