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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I am strongly in favour of moving the message
history from the local hard drive to the server. Only being able to access
message history from my home PC but not from my work one seems to go against the
overall design of Jabber.</FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2> It should be
stored on the server in the same way as my contact list is. I realise that
this would take up more space on the server, but it could be a good
chance for ISP's to add value.<BR></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Comments/suggestions welcome. My apologies to
anyone who has seen all this before.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Is anyone willing to help me with coming up with a
specification for this?</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><BR></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Do we need message history at all?</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>==========================</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I think so. Personally I find it very
useful. Also, since most of the Jabber clients support message history in
some form, I think that is a good indication that there is some demand for
it. Do you ever keep copies of your email? I am quite happy for it
to be optional, but I think it should be in the Jabber design.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>How would it be better on the server?</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>===========================</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>For a start, from the design of Jabber there is
only one machine on the Internet that is guaranteed to see every message that is
sent to or from my account, and that is the server. This means that if the
messages were to be archived somewhere, the server (or a machine locally
attached to it) is the ideal place to store them from a bandwidth point of
view. Also from a availability point of view the server again wins hands
down.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>There are also great advantages to the user.
No matter what client you have logged in from, you would have access to all your
message history. At work, at home, from your WAP phone, from a friends
computer, from an internet cafe - it makes no difference. In the same
way, you would be free to start using a different client without having to worry
if the new client will be able to read the message history files written by your
old client. This fits in nicely with Jabbers design philosophy I
think.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Also, if you are using someone else's PC, you don't
leave a message log on their hard drive for anyone to look through later,
however when you get home you can still check your message history for
anything you said while you were using it!</FONT></DIV></FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Servers are generally backed up too, so this solves
the problem of loosing your entire message history if your local hard drive
dies.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>There are other benefits as well. It will
become much easier to support message history in a client if the client doesn't
have to contain any database code to store and retrieve messages. Code to
request this information from the server can be added to JabberCOM or some other
library and will be available to all clients to use. The hard design and
coding work is done once on the server, and not one each client. So,
clients become lighter (use less RAM), and easier to develop.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Won't it take too much disk space on the
server?</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>====================================</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Maybe. Lets look at it:</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><BR>I am what I would consider a very heavy of ICQ
(I have about 100 people on my list) and I use ICQ every day and have done since
1998. I have never cleared my history. My .dat file that stores my message
history is currently 16MB. Being text it is very compressible - zipping it
brings it down to under 4MB<BR><BR>So best case for a moderate/heavy user is,
say 6MB uncompressed - or 1.5MB of real space if it is stored on a compressed
volume - per year. Of course add some space for indexing (lets double it
at least). Say 5MB compressed per active user, per year.<BR><BR>Also have
to factor:<BR>- a large percentage of IM accounts are not active, so space usage
will not be increasing<BR>- many people may not opt for message archiving or
some or all contacts<BR>- most people won't want to keep more than a years worth
of history<BR><BR>I can't really see disk space being a big issue, especially
with disk space becoming cheaper each year. Can anyone come up with
any better estimates than this?<BR></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2> </DIV></FONT>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>What about security?</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>================</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Security is always tricky. Some people aren't
going to be happy with all their private messages stored on someone else's
server. But think about it this way - you already have to trust your
Jabber admin to not be reading or logging your conversations. Assuming you
trust your admin, the additional risk comes in if security on the server is
compromised by a third party. Rather than just being able to read what you
are writing in real time, the hacker may be able to grab your history file and
read everything you have ever said from that account.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Really it comes down to how much you trust your
Jabber admin. People trust their money to banks, they upload their data to
xdrive.com and they trust their ISP's or Hotmail to store their private
emails. This is really no different. </FONT><FONT face=Arial
size=2>Obviously, you should be able to turn off logging for any or all accounts
if you do not want to take the risk.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Personally I won't be happy from a security
perspective until each message sent though Jabber is encrypted. The
messages can then be stored on the logs in encrypted form.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>As a Jabber admin I can't afford to supply extra
disk space for message history.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial
size=2>==========================================================</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>That's fine. It should be an optional feature
that can be enabled or disabled at the server. Also the amount of disk
space per user should be configurable. You could switch it
off entirely. or you could (for example) limit a free account to 5MB, but
give all the paying users a 50MB limit. As users reach their limit, the
older messages will drop off and be replaced by new messages. This could
be used as a value added service to encourage free account users to become
subscribers.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>What are the other disadvantages?</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>=========================</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Obviously there are a few on top of disk usage and
security. The speed of reading to the message log is going to be slower as
each message has to be retrieved from the server. The server will be under
a bit more load both with disk access and bandwidth as it retrieves
archived messages and sends them to the client. These problems will become
less noticeable each year however as bandwidth and server performance
increases. A poor design will not fix itself in a similar
way.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Michael.<BR></DIV></FONT></BODY></HTML>