In-game email (was Re: [MUD-Dev] On socialization and convenience)

[Gavin Doughtie]

"Koster, Raph" wrote:

>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Caliban Tiresias Darklock
>> Sent: Monday, June 18, 2001 8:21 PM
>> To: mud-dev at kanga.nu
>> Subject: Re: [MUD-Dev] On socialization and convenience

>> On Fri, 15 Jun 2001 22:33:34 -0700, "Sean Kelly" <sean at ffwd.cx> wrote:

>>> One thing that's kind of surprised me is that none of the
>>> MMORPGs I've played had any facility for sending messages to
>>> players who aren't currently online (mail).

> The logic against it goes like this:

>   * Yeesh! HOW much storage per player again? That's (takes out
>   * calculator) WAAAY too much money!

>   * Won't they use email anyway? We can't possibly make a nice
>   * enough email system to match Outlook!

>   * Yikes, think of the complications--email to account or to user?

Possibly, as a user option, you can set up an email forwarding
address for your characters/accounts in a given MUD. That way you're
only paying for outbound bandwidth, and that's going to be nicely
throttled since there won't be great big nasty UIs for threading and
forwarding etc. In other words, when I do "/email DethMaster Please
send me the address for the website with those cookie recipies,
thx." Then the mud server (as a batch or very low priority task)
looks up "DethMaster", finds that it's "kewld00d at hotmail.com", sends
him my little email with 'mycharacter at in_game_email.mymud.com' as
the return address. When he replies the process is repeated in the
other direction. The users get the benefit they want (non-sync
communications), and the mud server gives up minimal storage and
bandwidth in exchange.

Gavin

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