eMail HUD(scripted SL eMailer)

Hey.. sorry if this has been posted but i could not find it....
I have been looking to either find a HUD attachment that acts like an eMailer....
I was thinking of something like the one they use on Dot Hack (yes, yes... I'm a geek :/ so what!?)... It acts as a mini eMailing system... is there one already made? if not how would I go about making one? I'm sure it is something like a more automated version of the SL mailboxes they have... Like you write the name of the person, wrote the eMail, click send and it sends it to that person's eMailer HUD.

Dunno the Dot Hack emailer, so may be missing cool uber-geek stuff here, but as I pondered how such a thing might work, I found myself hard-pressed to come up with something more convenient than composing a notecard message and dropping it on the recipient's profile, and/or leaving them an IM. What additional features would be desired of the email HUD?

HAHA! glad I could be insperational to you(^W^). can't wait to see your work on it

Problem is, when you want to send an email to an object (namely, your email HUD), you need its UUID, not the owner's UUID. It would be easy if that UUID didn't change each time the object is rezzed, which happens when you detach/reattach it and when you log in. So you need to find a way to keep track of the UUID change, and it's a pain. My opinion is you'd need an external web server to connect to, which acts like an UUID database. But then, what's the use for a remailer...

Or an internal relay server! Thinking about a server every HUD contacts at rez, log or whatever and tells him the actual UUID, so this server kows which UUID the HUD has at any specific moment. So your HUD contacts this server also for the needed information, or you route the email via this server.

Just thinking!

Shyan

Emailing via script is quite simple in lsl.

create 3 strings:

string address = "name@domain.com";
string subject = "email subject"'
string message = "put email message here";

llEmail (address, subject, message);

and that's it.. check llEmail for the wiki, you can pole for incoming emails as well.

Johan,
So I can use llEmail to send the email, AND also to recieve it onto the eMailer HUD? That's great! Thanks alot to those that responded(^W^) this should help.

sorry for the double post, but this is something that is bugging me too:
I don't want it to bring up a notecard, It has to display the eMail on the HUD. Is this possible? Thanks again.

Eiji Mayo

Well, it's possible, but kinda limited. The most one can achieve with current (xyText1.2) approaches is 10 characters per prim. Theoretically one could have 256 prims in an attachment, so thats about 2K text displayed at any one time (perhaps conveniently, about the limit for the body of an llEmail message), leaving a few prims for controls like scrollbars, etc. This would be pretty slow and compute- and texture-intensive, by the way. (There are other tricks for displaying variable text, too, like llSetText(), but last I tried, that wasn't very well-behaved on HUDs.)

I'd been pondering the notecard approach because llEmail can't embed other media. On the other hand, I suppose one might devise an in-band tagging scheme for UUIDs of embedded images, for example, that might be "attached" by the sender.

Either an external webserver or an in-world "relay" server (or a few of them, in case one ever gets de-rezzed and thus looses its UUID) should work. When both sender and recipient are in-world at the same time, the server could act as just a UUID "address" registry for the HUDs, with email sent directly between HUDs. It gets substantially stickier and more memory-intensive when that server has to store-and-forward to a recipient HUD that is absent at the time the email is sent.

But still... it would be a fairly difficult hack, the best possible result of which would be functionally inferior to what's built-in, so... perhaps not a big market here.

I found the opposite with a hud I am trying to design. Because of the small size of the prims making up a hud I find the textures not very clear. However, llSetText () strings show up beautifully. As this is a total client side effect I expect that we will not all see huds in the same way.

Another problem already documented is that hud prims can unpredictably not appear but the llSetText strings they generate do always appear. I expect that to be fixed real soon (?).

Yes, u can.. however, the received email is the key of the object.. so it's difficult to reply to a "static" address, because if the object key changes when it's rezzed.. read the wiki on llEmail() for more info...