How do I send an IM from email?

How do I send an IM from email?

C'mon people, I know it is possible...

You can only reply to an IM that arrives as an email. You can, of course, hang on to the email address for that person, but in my experience, they don't last long--usually less than a week for me (though one worked for about 4 weeks before going belly up). At present, there is no way to initiate an email to someone in-world who has not emailed you first. There may be a third party program out there that does it, but so far, I've not found one.

Kam

If someone sends you an offline IM that you receive in email, just reply to that. They'll get it in-world. (The temporary email address their IM generates is only good for a day or three I think.)

If you want to generate a new IM to send to someone in-world, you need to use an EMAIL-to-IM gateway, an object in-world that you email. These require that you have the user key of the person you wish to contact.

A weird thing about these is that IMs from objects don't show up in the IM window, but instead pop up as green chat in the target's chat window. If they're in a busy area, they might not see it. (Object IMs do go to email though, if the user's offline.)

The other limitation is that you can't reply to object IMs, which means the person would have to open your profile and IM you in order to respond.

If someone sends YOU an IM you can then reply to it and the person will receive it in world. However, beware. Your Complete Email Header is displayed to the user in the IM window. So if your RL name is in your email header or you do not want anyone to know your email address, don't do it.

Instead use another email account for your SL needs and be sure the name you want displayed is in the email header.


Hope that helps.

Great, thank you both very much for your replies. Luckily, I have a working return email address for the person that I need to contact.

Ah, MadamG, good suggestion, I hadn't thought of that. In fact, now I'll set up a new addy specifically for SL for this reason!

Actually, in my experience your email info only shows up in the IM window if you forget to clear out the message before composing your reply. For example, when you hit Reply in Yahoo mail it quotes the person's original IM and includes your Yahoo name and email address. I just delete all that, type my reply, and send. This is something I've tested with an alt- but admit it hasn't been since LL changed the IM-to-email address format.

You are correct, WW. Only the text that is in the text field shows up in the IM. if that includes your email address, it will get seen, otherwise it's blind to the in-world reciever.

I use the Envoy

Dont remember where I bought it tho, but can look that up..

grtz C

I'm surprised no-one's mentioned Sleek: http://delta.slinked.net/programming/sleek/

So how does that work Bilbo?

Well, that's just a stripped down SL client. If you're at work and your firewall blocks the SL client, it will block SLeek as well. Nearly everyone has access to webmail though.

Ah, the dreaded Firewall! Yes, I'd picked this up from the recent wave of 'how can I chat with my in-world buddies on my laptop?' threads.

Sorry Feline, strictly second-hand info here .. never gone further than their welcome page.