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I have jabber clients on my computer (pidgin) and on mobile phones (im+). For now each message is received by arbitrary one of them (or so it looks). For instance, if a person sends two messages one after another, one can get into one client, the second one into another. What makes a message being received by some particular client? Is there a way to make one particular client receive the messages? All the clients?

vfbsilva
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x-yuri
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  • I don't have an autoritative answer but this has something to do with XMPP (Jabber protocol which your clients use) take a look on this linK: http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0280.html it might explain what is going on. Also In a dumb straight foward statement I assume you can send messages to diferent target ports hence making a given message to be recieved by a specific client. – vfbsilva Oct 23 '14 at 05:13
  • Note that Pidgin does not support Message Carbons (which is part of the problem here). See this patch (that they've been sitting on for far too long): https://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/15508 – Sam Whited Oct 25 '14 at 03:51

1 Answers1

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(This answer ignores some of the grittier details in favour of a useful response, there's slightly more to it than this)

Each XMPP session has a 'priority' associated with it, and also a resource. When you send a message, you can either include a resource to send it to or not - if you include a resource to send it to, it will always be delivered to that resource (client). When you don't send the message to a particular resource it'll be delivered according to some rules the server sets, but these are generally that it'll go to the session or sessions with the highest priority (which your client may be setting for you without you knowing).

Some clients are very bad at sending messages to some resource and never stopping, even if you log in other clients, which I suspect is what you're seeing (that is, your contacts' clients think "Oh, you're over there, I'll talk to you there!" and never bother changing that when you go offline or change your clients).

(And yes, Carbons (XEP-0280) will change these routing rules, delivering to all clients that 'opt in' to carbons - but I'm guessing you're not using this)

Kev
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  • Nice and to the point... +1 and Welcome – eyoung100 Oct 23 '14 at 19:51
  • Can you suggest a jabber client or tell me where in pidgin I can set priority? Also, is there a way to debug the issue in some way, probably with some sniffing? To determine priorities or resources of all the clients, for instance. And, it's not that messages get delivered to clients which are already offline. They are coming to different clients and the history is spread across them. And I might miss messages because I didn't expect them to be received on that particular client. – x-yuri Oct 23 '14 at 22:23
  • Now that I think about it, priority may rise when I do something with a phone. I might have done something on the phone in the middle of talking to someone. And that may have caused messages to be delivered to the phone, not to the computer. – x-yuri Oct 23 '14 at 22:24
  • Yes, some clients raise their resource when they're active and lower when they're inactive, that's possible. For where in Pidgin to set your priority I'm afraid I have no clue - I run other XMPP clients. – Kev Oct 24 '14 at 08:29
  • @x-yuri: [According to their documentation](https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/Protocol%20Specific%20Questions#HowcanIconfigureresourcepriority), Pidgin doesn’t support changing the priority (which is a pity). – unor Oct 24 '14 at 21:59
  • You might have missed one of my messages. Anyways, can you recommend a client for `linux` or `ios`? Also, @unor, according to your link `pidgin` does support changing the priority, it's not very flexible though. – x-yuri Oct 25 '14 at 09:35
  • I'm afraid the clients I use don't allow you to change your priority - I only use variations of the Swift client (of which I'm an author), so everything has the same priority and stuff works (Swift also tries to do sensible things with choice of sending with resources or not to get the user the messages). I know Psi (with which I used to be involved) lets you set priorities. – Kev Oct 25 '14 at 09:47
  • @x-yuri: You could create a question on [softwarerecs.se]. – unor Oct 25 '14 at 13:29