When I open a chat with a contact from any client, I want to see our past conversation. Jabber server-side message archiving capable is what I need to really make instant messaging the tool it should be. Being a long time user of Dircproxy, an IRC proxy that does just that, I sorely miss it when using Jabber. Now that Google Talk features “Chat History” the clamor from the masses is growing for implementations of Message Archiving as described in JEP-0136.

Right now the only choice seems to be Datasink, an external component that implements Message Archiving (JEP-0136). It is theoritically pluggable into any Jabber server. There is a good recipe for installing Datasink along Ejabberd. But client support is lacking : apart from JWChat I have not found a single client supporting the functionnality provided by Datasink. As the author of Datasink says : “Datasink uses MySQL as storage backend. It’s been written mainly for having a chat history with JWChat as it can’t save to a local disk itself due to security restrictions“. So we can consider that anything else is a lucky by-product.

The Google Talk “Chat History” is not JEP-0136. But as a recent conversation on [jdev] about Google Talk and server-side logging testifies, the topic raises significant interest.

A discussion on the Ejabberd development forum mentions that “JEP-136 seems to be implemented [..] by Jabberd 1.4.5“. But I have found no trace of that anywhere else. Right now, JEP-0136 implementation is a wishlist item for Ejabberd. I’ll think about it for my next letter to Santa Claus.

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