messages

[Tchotchke]

I get messages that pop up on the right side of my screen at the top...I can't find a history of them and so when I delete them they seem to be gone forever. Any way to recover them?....sometimes I have enough that one of the messages says messages capped...another mystery but not so important as recovering messages accidently deleted.

[Rolig Loon]

Those may be either group notices or system messages.  They may be announcing some group event, for example, or they may be verifying that you have just paid to upload an asset.  Some viewers, like Firestorm, give you the option of having those notices displayed in the lower right corner of the screen.  Linden Lab's V3 defaults to the upper right.  In any case, when there are notices there, you should see a little icon that allows you to open them and see the list.  You may view the (and delete them) one at a time, or you may right-click the icon and select "Close All" to empty the list. 

Once you have deleted a notice, it is gone forever.  If it's a group notice and it was sent within the past 30 days, you should be able to open the group's profile, look under the Notices tab, and read it there.  System notices are not preserved at all.  It is good practice to delete any notices once you have read them, so that the stack doesn't get unmanageably large.  When you log in to SL, the servers have to process the full list so that it can be displayed.  If the list is too large, the servers can time out before they finish handling it, and you will be blocked from login.  Some types of messages are, in fact, capped to prevent that.