[JDEV] How to handle multiple clients

[Tim MacKenzie]

On Sun, Jan 10, 1999 at 10:43:40PM -0500, Jeff McBride wrote:
> First of all, I just want to say that I have been watching the list for a
> few days and I am very interested in helping out with jabber. It is a cool
> idea. 

Me too... I have a similar tool to jabber, goofey, which is also fairly
server-centric (actually, much more so) and am investigating whether to
build a goofey transport for jabber and migrate users over. 
[see http://www.cs.monash.edu.au/~tym/goofey.html ]

Anyway, having written and run goofey for almost 9 years with 1500
or so active users (mostly at Monash University in Australia) I have
seen a lot of these type of issues so hopefully I'll be able to provide
a useful perspective.

> I have seen the discussion about multiple clients and how message are
> handled when they are sent to someone that is connected from multiple
> places. How about something similar to IMAP? Basically, if I am connected
> from 3 different clients, and I recieve a message, all three clients are
> notified about it. At that point, the message could either be sent
> entirely to each of the clients, what I think is better, it could simply

I agree that it should be sent to all clients, unless the user requests
otherwise. Goofey has the concept of a "designated client" which is
the client to which messages are sent, if there is no designated client
then messages go to all of a user's clients.

We also have a "quiet" concept. A quiet user will have all messages
kept unread on the server but still be "present". When a designated
client dies the user is automatically switched to quiet.

> One more thing, I know there is talk about some kind of SMTP interface.
> What exactly is the idea behind this? What should it acclomplish? The
> ability to send an email to an address and have it delivered to the
> person's jabber client? If someone could please explain this it would be
> great. I may even try to get something working. 

jabber -> SMTP would be useful. If I was not going to have jabber access
but still had email, forwarding jabber messages would be useful. In goofey
only a limited number of unread messages are kept for a limited time before
being automatically forwarded to the users email address.

Tim
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