XEP-0136: Message Archiving
Storing the Jabber History on the Server
Like many other people I tend to use instant messaging on a lot of different workstations: At home, at work, on my notebook and sometimes from abroad using Jeti Applet. Even on my own workstation I use different Jabber clients like Psi and Spark which seems to be the only client with full support for Asterisk-IM right now.
This all works very well with one major drawback: The history of my chats is spread around different machines and whenever I need to look up something it's more often than not not available on the machine I am currently working on. This situation remembers me of the old days before I switched my email store to a central IMAP server and used POP3 for email download. With Instant Messaging becoming more and more important I feel the need for a similar central archive for my IM chats.
For Openfire, the Jabber server of my choice, there are some archiving features available in the enterprise edition and a few external open source plugins with similar goals like SmilingJ's Netlog. They are logging messages as they pass the server and provide a web interface for message retrieval.
This is all very nice but still a bit off the solution I am dreaming of. I would really like to have the message archive integrated within my Jabber client just like they are now with the only difference being that the messages are retrieved from the server instead of the local filesystem.
It turns out that I am not alone with that vision. There is XEP-0136: Message Archiving a proposed XMPP (Jabber) extension for server side message archiving. The XEP supports configuration of which messages to archive, encryption and basic searching. It is not yet approved but may turn out to be exactly what I am looking for.