Offline Instant Message Delivery

[kahtman]

i agree with smily this is a serious flaw. a friend talked me into skype but not that happy coz yahoo will send a message when the recipiant logs in. great if ur telling a friend u wont be on and why. Skype they just wonder where u are.

[donnasnowden]

Hi!  About this offline message thing... I'm not brilliantly computer savvy, but I get that the messages only go through now when both parties are logged into skype at the same time.

And I don;t know if I'm asking the right person, but...

... how do  know whether my message has gone through or not? If it gives a date and time for the message, as opposed to "pending" can I assume it has been delivered? Does it make a difference if either f the parties is "invisible" or "not available"?

[highlander22111]

What is the point of having an offline message service if both parties have to be online in order to receive it?????????????????????????????

[rseiler]

That's the thing: they haven't actually had an offline message service for a year and a half, ever since The Incident alluded to earlier.

However, with MS's revamping of the back-end, we're now past the time of excuses:

arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/skype-replaces-p2p-supernodes-with-linux-boxes-hosted-by-microsoft 

"As part of our ongoing commitment to continually improve the Skype user experience, we developed supernodes which can be located on dedicated servers within secure datacentres. This has not changed the underlying nature of Skype’s peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture, in which supernodes simply allow users to find one another (calls do not pass through supernodes). We believe this approach has immediate performance, scalability and availability benefits for the hundreds of millions of users that make up the Skype community."

Mark Gillett, CVP, Skype Product Engineering & Operations

[SomeoneOrOther]

I agree: sending a message when the other person is offline is completely useless, if there's no offline messaging. (I've had friends tell me they thought I was ignoring them, because they weren't getting my offline messages.)

Windows Live / MSN has always had this feature (even if it didn't always work via Adium).

With M$ now removing Skype's P2P architecture and putting in dedicated servers (as mentioned by the previous guy), there's no reason not to put this feature in!

P.S. I wish Skype would do what Dropbox does on its forums: add a Features Wishlist where people can list features they want added, and people vote on them.

[taragrozelle]

I agree that Skype should have Offline messaging...  Now I sort of know why my messages to a friend of mine aren't going through...  It's completely assinine that both parties have to be online at the same time for the messages to go through.

*shakes head*  They should do what MSN does since those that use the program are being forced to look for other avenues to stay in touch with their friends and families in other ways.

[rseiler]

Maybe there's hope:

http://community.skype.com/t5/Windows/Offline-messaging/td-p/545137

[MIC95]

I just encountered that same problem, and I didn't realize the messages weren't being delivered.  It was terrible.  I let down a friend that really had some problems, and they were just left wondering why I didn't show up.