What are the rules for when chat messages appear in a user's inbox?

Question

On November the 2nd, a chat message was addressed to me:

@TonyMeyer - You have any ideas for articles you need written? I was going to review a book, but I likely won't finish it for another week or two. ("Embassytown" by China Mieville.)

This happened again on the 13th of November:

@TonyMeyer @OghmaOsiris - FInding it hard to make it through China Mieville's "Embassytown". Urg. If anyone else has read this and wants to review it, go ahead. Will give the book one final effort, then move onto the new "I, Robot" novel next.

Neither of these messages appeared as notifications in my StackExchange inbox. I checked again now, and there are no entries between Oct 20 and Nov 2 from this site, and the Nov 13 entry isn't there either.

My previous post in the room was Oct 20 (I do not recall whether or not I visited the room after that time and didn't say anything). There was no activity at all in the room between Oct 20 and Oct 30.

This has a significant impact on the still-open question about blog organisation. If notifications from chat don't get delivered to the user in some cases (time since being in the room?) then (a) in order for anyone to use it to contact me, I'll need to meet some sort of conditions (e.g. "go into room every day, even if nothing has changed"), and (b) it's fairly useless as a way of contacting potential post authors.

Answer 1

To use you as an example:

1. @TonyMeyer, i.e. an exact match will cause a notification if you've been in the room in the past seven days.
2. @Tony, i.e. a first name match (to be precise, a word boundary match) will cause a notification if you've been in the room in the past two days.

3. @Ton will notify you if you've been in the room in the past two days and there's no other user for whom this would be a better match, e.g. someone called "Ton" who has been there within the past seven days (that's 1.) or someone called "Ton Ynnuf" who has been there within the past two days (that's 2.).

4. An explicit reply to one of your messages (like this one) will always cause a notification.

In addition, these notifications will only be delivered to your global inbox if you haven't seen them within a reasonable amount of time (~20 minutes), where "seen" is defined as one of the following:

• visiting a direct permalink to the message in question,
• acknowledging it through clicking the little number that's popping up on you profile picture in the chat room when you have replies,
• or saying something in the room in question.