[Discuss] sharing Jabber between desktop and mobile devces

[tmetro+blu at gmail.com (Tom Metro)]

I predominantly use Jabber for IM, and I have clients on my desktop and
mobile devices. Being signed in to a Jabber server from multiple
locations leads to problems:

-some servers/clients try ad be smart and not send messages to a client
it thinks is away or idle. So if you start a conversation on a mobile
device, then put it down, and later (after some time) go to complete it
at your desktop, a portion of the conversation will have ended up going
to the mobile device and be absent from the desktop.

-logging is inconsistently distributed among the devices, instead of
centralized.

If you then add the complication of encryption (OTR,
http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/), things break even more, as each client
has a unique client key, and switching clients mid-session results in
breaking the encryption channel. (It might be possible to load the same
key onto multiple devices. At minimum, switching devices will require a
session key renegotiation.)

The classic way this sort of problem was addressed with IRC is that
you'd run a command line client on some server, and then just ssh in to
that from any client machine. I'd rather not replicate that by using a
command line Jabber client.

Some of the logging issues can be addressed by running your own Jabber
server, and doing the logging there, but that doesn't help if you are
using someone else's Jabber server (Google's, for example).

There are a few IM clients that also offer web-clients and will do
server-side logging (IMO (https://imo.im/), which has web, Android, and
other clients), but then you give up encryption and privacy.

It seems like the solution might be some sort of Jabber proxy, that can
do central logging and provide persistence for intermittently connected
clients. It could also act as the OTR end-point, which breaks end-to-end
security, but if I'm controlling the proxy and I have an SSL link
between my clients and the proxy, I'm OK with that.

Has anyone cobbled together a solution to this problem?

 -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/