I think a mail system would be pretty neat. Easy to contact other players when not available, and good for trade and communication purposes....Just an idea. (:

Astronut

Or maybe leave somebody a message at a station, and when the recipient docks at any station of the same faction, player is notified of the message.

You can leave buddies messages, but hardly anyone ever does it.

The problem I have with buddy messages is that if you leave one, then leave a second before the first one is seen, the first is wiped out. It would need a better interface to really catch on.

You can leave buddies messages, but hardly anyone ever does it.

Yeah, there are good reasons for this.

1. Only one can be left.
2. Most players who know about this feature also use plugins, most of which spam you a message with "Plugin Loaded" to the chat bar on game entry, so the message gets lost anyway.
3. There's no real interface.

Also, you only get one chance to read it (well, you could pull it from your errors.log file if you knew it happened but has already scrolled off your buffer, but...)

A way to send persistent messages that accumulate in their inbox until they choose to delete them would be vastly superior.

Of course, as soon as that happens, those inboxes will start filling with travel-agency spam and such, so somebody will have to write plugins to implement various filter rules and stuff.