Jeogeot Has A Post Office!!

[Teresa Firelight]

Second Life has a Postal Service?? Yes it does!

It is intended for FUN and community building. There is nothing that it does that you could not accomplish in IMs, but this way is a bit more immersive and “fun” that simply sending an IM. You can send letters (notecards) or packages (e.g., any transferable object ... cards, flowers, gifts, etc).

A brand new post office has been put out for the Jeogeot continent, located here:

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Strata/221/168/3001

This is part of a larger system of post offices, located on five SL continents, including Bellisseria, Horizons, Jeogeot, Sansara and Satori. (We will expand post offices to other continents over time).

You can find a LOT of information about the BBB Postal Service at the Jeogeot Post Office. Just TP there and click the FAQ board. However, I will include a bit more information about SL's postal service here:

 The BBB Post Office is a one of its kind, Experience-based system that allows you to both send and receive actual mail in Second Life.

There are two ways you can participate. You can go to the post office to get your own personal mailbox, then rez it at any SL property where you have rez rights. Then your mail will be delivered to your personal mailbox.

(Please note that it will also be necessary to go to your Land Options and  add "BBB Experience" owned by "Midnightscripter" to make it all work. If you dont have rights to set an experience on the parcel, you can ask the land-owner to do that for you.).

The other way you can participate is to simply go to the post office to check your mail. There is a wall of PO Boxes… just click it to collect your mail.

This is a free service, run by volunteers for fun, immersion  and the sheer joy of communication. It is available to anyone in SL whether or not they own land.

Edited July 25, 2022 by Teresa Firelight
fixed typo

[diamond Marchant]

Might wanna change the Place Profile as it looks like a no-tell-motel Further research shows that the Motel is at ground level and the post-office is in a skybox above one of the rooms.

It also might be good to have a privacy statement somewhere. Does the system communicate with any servers external to SL? Is any mail activity logged? If so, who has access to that information?

For example, in BelliBin (waste collection roleplay) there are no external servers, a BelliBin owner receives an IM when their bin is emptied giving the name of the collector, no information is logged, and a count of collections is maintained in the collectors BelliFind HUD (access to owner only). No record is maintained by BelliBin if a gift is given.

Edited July 24, 2022 by diamond Marchant
privacy update

[Qie Niangao]

5 hours ago, Teresa Firelight said:

Experience-based

My hunch is that this lets the system operate without any external servers at all, instead using Key-Value Pair storage of that Experience, but @diamond Marchant's point is well-taken nonetheless: users will expect to see a privacy policy before using such a system (possibly regardless of the legal significance of such a statement—so this Post Office may not be the ideal medium for exchanging state secrets anyway).

5 hours ago, Teresa Firelight said:

Sansarea

… what Sansara should have been called!

📬

[Teresa Firelight]

16 hours ago, diamond Marchant said:

Might wanna change the Place Profile as it looks like a no-tell-motel Further research shows that the Motel is at ground level and the post-office is in a skybox above one of the rooms.

It also might be good to have a privacy statement somewhere. Does the system communicate with any servers external to SL? Is any mail activity logged? If so, who has access to that information?

For example, in BelliBin (waste collection roleplay) there are no external servers, a BelliBin owner receives an IM when their bin is emptied giving the name of the collector, no information is logged, and a count of collections is maintained in the collectors BelliFind HUD (access to owner only). No record is maintained by BelliBin if a gift is given.

 

Thank you for the inputs. It had not occurred to me to add a privacy  statement, and is a very good idea. I have already updated my copy of the FAQ to include that, and will propagate that to the post office locations later when I have had some sleep.

The short answer for those who want to know.. we dont use an external server and we dont keep records except for temporary records used by the system (and unreadable to anyone else) while delivery is in process. So yes, privacy is protected. All the same, I dont recommend sending anything that goes against the SL TOS or sending anything that is harassing to the recipient. They will know who it comes from and have the ability to Abuse Report the mail.

Regarding the Place Profile.. the tricky part is that this location was generously Donated for our use by a post office enthusiast... it is her land and we have a skybox for the post office. I will touch bases with her to see if it is possible to also add something to the place profile about the post office... but in the end it will be her decision. (One of the BBB team raised the same concern a few days ago.)

[Teresa Firelight]

14 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

My hunch is that this lets the system operate without any external servers at all, instead using Key-Value Pair storage of that Experience, but @diamond Marchant's point is well-taken nonetheless: users will expect to see a privacy policy before using such a system (possibly regardless of the legal significance of such a statement—so this Post Office may not be the ideal medium for exchanging state secrets anyway).

… what Sansara should have been called!

📬

yep your hunch is correct Qie.

And thank you for pointing on the TYPO on Sansara continent name. I have mild dylexia and frequently I dont see typos.  I will get that fixed in our documentation and I have already edited my original post.

 

[Martina Voxel]

Hello. Thank you for the report. I updated the parcel details. I m happy to host the Post Office on my parcel. 

[Qie Niangao]

I got to thinking that this is part of the "Bellisserian Bureau of Bureaucracy" initiative, so I figured those Bureaucrats would be irrepressible on anything like a privacy policy, so I took to reading the documentation. Unrelated, while reading I came across this interesting distinction (from the Post Office FAQ):

Quote

There is a distinction made between the Bellisseria post office and ALL other post offices. If your property is in Belisseria, you need to get your personal mailbox from the Bellisseria Main Post office.

If you reside anywhere else in SL, then you can get it from ANY post office EXCEPT the Bellisseria one.

I wonder why. Could it be related to the "house numbers" each Bellisseria parcel is assigned, in case that ever becomes relevant to an "address" for "mail delivery" somehow? I'm not thinking of anything special about the Belli covenant or land settings that should affect a "personal mailbox" script. (Belli parcels are never group-owned, but there's no requirement that the mailbox be owned by the landowner anyway.)

As a starter experiment, I rezzed a mailbox obtained from the "Sansarea"* post office on my Belli houseboat, and it seemed to work, as did one from the Belli main post office. (Well, they both report a very common Experience error that arises when the avatar for which the script has experience permissions steps off the Experience-enabled parcel. Nothing to worry about there.) The mailboxes do check for mail first at their post office of origin, rather than the continent on which they're rezzed (no idea how they're doing that). Then I tried on a Heterocera parcel and indeed the mailbox that originate at the Belli post office says "Currently only works within Bellisseria" so apparently there's some difference behind that distinction.

To me, a deeper mystery is how the mailboxes know to check for mail starting at their post office of origin before checking all the others. (I'm also not sure why they do that, but it's kinda cool that they do.)

_________________
*Indeed, the BBB documentation and objects all referred to Sansara as "Sansarea"—and I was still working on this post when @Teresa Firelight explained about that.

[Love Zhaoying]

16 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

Could it be related to the "house numbers" each Bellisseria parcel is assigned, in case that ever becomes relevant to an "address" for "mail delivery" somehow? 

That would be interesting with all the Belli "house flipping" (would mail get forwarded to the user's 17th new house address since it was first sent?) It would also be cool if you could send mail to an "address", not specifically a "person". Good for junk mail, etc. ("To Addressee")

[Teresa Firelight]

About the Belli distinction... the original personal mailboxes were designed to work only in Bellisseria and were scripted to complain if they were rezzed somewhere else.  At that point our focus was ONLY on Bellisseria.

It did not take very long for us to realize that this postal service might be FUN for everyone in SL, regardless of where they lived and regardless if they owned/rented SL Property. So we expanded it. The new (non-bellisseria) post offices provided personal mail boxes did not have the location check and will work wherever they are rezzed (assuming the land has the experience enabled AND allows scripts to be run).

Since a lot of Bellisserian residents had already collected/rezzed their mailboxes, we decided not to force them to update those boxes. So we left the Belli boxes as originally designed. And we provided personal mailboxes from other locations that did not do a location check.

It is more historical than any other reason, but there is a slight difference in the personal mailboxes provided by the Bellisseria post office and boxes provided by any other post office.

[Teresa Firelight]

I love how people are coming up with great questions and comments on the postal service.

To answer another one about addressing ... the PO box address is not based on the physical location where it is rezzed, but is based on the  UUID of the person who rezzes it. 

So it wont matter of a previous parcel owner had a mailbox rezzed. When you rez your mailbox, you will never get mail intended for the previous home owner. And when you move to a new location, the new home owner will never get your mail.

[Love Zhaoying]

If you use the mailboxes, will only the avatar who signed up be able to use them?

Or, can your "Alts" also use them?

[Teresa Firelight]

1 hour ago, Love Zhaoying said:

If you use the mailboxes, will only the avatar who signed up be able to use them?

Or, can your "Alts" also use them?

only one avatar per mailbox. however, you can get a mail box for each of your alts if you want to.

 

[Qie Niangao]

A little experimentation with alts: It appears that the mailboxes only respond to touches by their owners, so alts would need to get their own (or go to a post office) to pick up their mail.

It's a more interesting scripting problem than it might seem at first. Apparently the mailbox's post office of origin has a special role (still not sure how) because in my tests it always checks for mail first, and after all the others have checked it also announces that the checking is complete, so it must observe all the checking, but the individual post offices each IM their results to the avatar directly. I think I'd script this using KVP message queuing exclusively (not with HTTP requests) partially because it's simpler overall but especially for this kind of broadcast messaging, so all the post offices can see the query at once, and one post office can see reports of each post office's responses. (The HTTP equivalent could use KVP as a directory of post office URLs, but there'd need to be separate point-to-point messages to and from each.)

[Love Zhaoying]

14 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

A little experimentation with alts: It appears that the mailboxes only respond to touches by their owners, so alts would need to get their own (or go to a post office) to pick up their mail.

It's a more interesting scripting problem than it might seem at first. Apparently the mailbox's post office of origin has a special role (still not sure how) because in my tests it always checks for mail first, and after all the others have checked it also announces that the checking is complete, so it must observe all the checking, but the individual post offices each IM their results to the avatar directly. I think I'd script this using KVP message queuing exclusively (not with HTTP requests) partially because it's simpler overall but especially for this kind of broadcast messaging, so all the post offices can see the query at once, and one post office can see reports of each post office's responses. (The HTTP equivalent could use KVP as a directory of post office URLs, but there'd need to be separate point-to-point messages to and from each.)

It's all quite interesting to me, mostly related to my side-questions.  In "real life", obviously anyone can get mail sent to your address.

People living with you is the most common valid case. Parents, children, etc.

But also in "real life", the mailbox is associated more with the "address" than with the "person".

[Teresa Firelight]

I have updated the documentation based on feedback from this thread: The post office manual, the setup instructions, LM name and the FAQ. Thanks for all the helpful comments/questions shared here.

If you would like to see the updates, please visit the Jeogeot PO for the updated info at: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Strata/221/168/3001.