There are cases where you want to reach a Second Life resident with means other than offline-IM or notecard. The easiest thing would be to send an email - but what if the resident has the mail address not on their profile? The easiest solution would be asking of course, but if the resident is offline this kind of defeats the case. Here are some suggestions:- From my experience, the majority of residents has email accounts for their avatar on Googlemail/Gmail. Most addresses follow the line of:
Firstname.Lastname@gmail.com
FirstnameLastname@gmail.com
F.Lastname@gmail.com
FLastname@gmail.com
Firstname.L@gmail.com
FirstnameL@gmail.com
Please note that due to various reasons addresses from certain countries use @googlemail.com - however for receiving email, the @gmail.com works as well.
Hint courtesy of Quaintly Tuqiri: the dot is optional - GMail is smart enough to deliver mails to addresses with dot even when it was omitted. - While Googlemail is the most common webmail service among residents, other services are popular as well. So check out Yahoo and Hotmail as well. Please note that Yahoo uses country specific domains - you might try Yahoo.de for German residents for example. For French residents wanadoo.fr and for Dutch residents xss4all.nl are good choices too. For the address part, refer to the Google examples.
- In case these bounce, you might want to check if the resident has a Flickr account. In that case, you can send them a Flickr Mail. The system will send them a notification to whatever mail address they have escrowed in their account.
- You can also check if the resident has a user account in the Xstreet SL Forums or the SLUniverse Forums. For Xstreet SL it is easiest to check with a Google query along the lines of "Firstname Lastname inurl:xstreetsl inurl:Forums". SL Universe has an easily accessible member list. For both forums you need to sign up, but afterwards you can send the members personal messages - they get pinged by whatever email address they have in their account.
- You can also check if the resident has an account on Twitter or Plurk and send a message there - however it will be public and limited to 140 characters, but might be enough for initial contact.
The photo is the Dublin Post Office - I thought it would fit this article nicely.
7 comments:
FYI for Gmail it doesn't matter whether the actual address has a dot. My email doesn't have one, but someone once sent it with a dot separating firstname.lastname and it still arrived. Likewise, if your email address has a dot and you send without, it'll still arrive.
Also, it's not possible to send a private message to someone on Plurk unless you're on their Plurk friendslist. However if you can manage to see their timeline (ie. they did not make their timeline private), you would be able to leave a comment in one of their plurks, but like you said, it would be public -- and unrelated to the original plurk. Plus, you'd have to actually sign up for Plurk first :P
Continuing the gmail dot thing, it's apparently to be used as a kind of filter. Your address is without dots, but you can put dots differently every time you are asked for email addys on the web.
You can then figure out which company gave the address to the spam monkeys, by which dotted addresses the spam is sent too.
Clever but way to complicated for me.
My favorite and easiest way?
RL-SL Plug:
https://xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=302750
A couple of other methods are:
Checking the in-world profile for an e-mail address.
Checking out any blogs owned by the avatar for contact info. (Mine is at the very bottom of my blog pages)
The Dutch provider is called xs4all (one s) ;-)
I have to agree with some feelings raised in other places. I personally believe this borders on being a stalking/ harrasment case. I quote from the Wikipedia entry on stalking...
"Individuals characterised as stalkers may have a mistaken belief that the other person loves them, or have a desire to help the other person. Stalking consists of a series of actions which in themselves can be legal, such as calling on the phone, sending gifts, or sending emails."
Business owners (or individuals) have the right to CHOOSE if they publish their email address or not. It is their choice in the first place and it must be respected. If they lose out on any business because they have not published this address then so be it. The decision is theirs alone to make.
Then there's also cases like mine, where I accidentally found out (I googled myself)that there's a RL Elaine Lisle. Being aware of it, I didn't want to create an email account associated with another person's RL name, as it could be confusing. My choice in this case was to use a totally random address, without any references to RL/SL names.
Post a Comment