Forwarding Instant Messages (IMs)

Hi,

Is there any way I can script to forward certain IMs to another agent?

Reason I am asking is this: I have a private island sim with a rental business on it. The rental system server IMs me whenever a tenant pays, or a property becomes vacant etc. As I cover European time, I have a Manager who covers US time, and she needs the same info. I need to be able to forward all IMs to my manager sent by the rental server to me.

Is it possible?

Regards

Rock

Afraid Not. IM's go directly to the client viewer and short of using an alternative client there is no way of intercepting them.

Actually, it's possible. First, you need to have your prefs set to email you when you're not ingame. Second, you'd need a web presence with server side software to read your incoming mail, scan for mail from the rental system, and forward it to the other manager (using an email address based on the manager's UUID).

This isn't trivial. I don't know how to write the web script to handle the email, but I'm confident it can be done. There's a good chance you can even do the forwarding just using standard mail server filters, depending on the system provided by your web host.

But I agree with Newgate that there's no way to do this entirely in-game. And note the following holes:

- if you're ingame but off-work, you'll get the IMs and not the email, so you'll have to handle them or forward them personally

- you will lose IMs that happen just as you log off -- ones that get delivered after you've committed yourself to logging off but before the system has processed it enough to know you're off. Part of this is simply human reaction time and part of it is system latency and "race condition" issues. In both cases, though, you can cover the gap by turning on logging for IMs and daily scan your log file directory for missed IMs. (If you sort by date, they'd be right at the top so this wouldn't be too hard.)

Hmmm -- oops, maybe logging won't help. I'd have to test to see whether object IMs get logged. I suspect they would get logged in the general chat log, not an IM log. IMs from objects are a bit different than IMs from avs.

I do not wish to intercept IMs.

a) I want IMs that reach me from a certain sender to trigger an event.

b) The event handler would then extract the message I have received,

c) then package it and send it as an IM to my manager.

Which of the above do you believe is not possible?

Rock

a) is not possible, all SL scripts are serverside and you can't put scripts into your avatar

Basically you need to rely on LL to get the IM out of their system to a place where you can use a script or program to do anything with it. The only way to do that is the IM->Email option mentioned above.

You could just have the script IM whichever person is online for that time. Or IM both users.
Should be fairly trivial if you have mod rights on the scripts.

Just have the rental server send the message to both of you.

This is what Newgate means by "intercepting". As mentioned above, (a) is not possible ingame. SL scripts have no way to see IMs sent to you or to recognize that this has happened. LL would have to add a new feature, and I have no idea what the technical implications would be.