I am enclosing an IM correspondance with someone I know.....This
person has not been showing up on my buddy list as online  at all.and
was not showing up as online when I IMed him...I decided to IM him
since I had just received an email from him. I wanted to see if he
could be online and was surprised that he ans.  After you read this, I
would like to know what he did that I received this message and then
the error message?


shotsie98 (11:54:50 PM): hey there
Telestai7 (11:55:07 PM): Hey
shotsie98 (11:57:23 PM): you mean you are actually online??? :-)_

Previous message was not received by Telestai7 because of error
(11:57:23 PM): User Telestai7 is not available.

Hi again, charae...

As to him being online and not showing up on your buddy list,
it's quite simple for him to set his status as invisible to
everyone, either using features in AIM itself, or in another
chat program which is compatible with AIM, such as Trillian.
Being invisible will not prevent him from sending messages
or receiving them and responding to them.


The error message you received is the standard AIM message
which is displayed when you send a message to someone who 
has gone offline, or left chat, as you can see in the logs
of AIM chats which have been copied and posted on the internet,
and which contain that very same message, as shown in the
results of a Google search for:

"Previous message was not received by"
://www.google.com/search?q=%22Previous+message+was+not+received+by%22

Whether he intentionally logged off chat, or whether his system
shut down coincidentally at that exact moment, is impossible to
determine on the basis of the message itself, so even if you
suspect he may have been avoiding you, he can claim that his
system crashed or there was a power outage, and there is no
way to prove him wrong.


Feel free to ask if anything is unclear.

Please do not rate this answer until you are satisfied that  
the answer cannot be improved upon by way of a dialog  
established through the "Request for Clarification" process. 

sublime1-ga


Searches done, via Google:

"Previous message was not received by"
://www.google.com/search?q=%22Previous+message+was+not+received+by%22

invisible on "aim buddy list"
://www.google.com/search?q=invisible+on+%22aim+buddy+list%22