Inbox

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Inbox This specification proposes a mechanism by which clients can find a list of ongoing conversations and their state. &LEGALNOTICE; XXXX ProtoXEP Standards Track Standards XMPP Core XEP-0313 inbox &dcridland; 0.0.1 2019-12-30 dwd

Initial Revision

When initially run, a messaging client typically shows some list of contacts and chatrooms, and whether any new messages are present in each.

The current mechanism for achieving this UX involves a complete synchronization of the server-side archive, and is both time-consuming and bandwidth-intensive. This specification proposes a solution to directly obtain such data from the server.

Moreover, the information gathered by the server to support this can be used in support of mobile push notifications.

Nomenclature used for instant messages versus ancillary messages will need to be adjusted to make it consistent with &xep0422; et al.

Support for this protocol is advertised by the Service Discovery protocol defined in &xep0030; using a feature of &ns;.

The Inbox consists semantically of a list of conversations in order of last activity. Each conversation is identified by a jid - for group chats this would be the chatroom, and for individual contacts this would be their bare jid.

Each Inbox entry includes a count of messages considered new, the last MAM stanza-id relating to this conversation, and the last MAM result for this conversation, as defined by &xep0313;. In addition, a client-controlled boolean marker can be used to indicate a manual "set unread" state.

Finding more messages from this conversation can be achieved via a MAM query using with to specify the conversation required.

An &IQ; of type "get" is used, containing a single element <inbox/>, containing an optional RSM filter as specified by &xep0059;. This will typically be sent only to the user's own bare jid. The server responds with a sequence of &MESSAGE; stanzas, each containing an <entry/> element qualified by the &ns; namespace with a number of attributes:

jid - contains the Jid of the conversation for this entry.
unread - contains a count of messages which are deemed to be unread by the server.
marked - a boolean indicating that a client has explicitly marked the conversation for some reason.

The <entry/> element contains the latest instant message, if any, which is encapsulated as a <result/> element as defined by &xep0313;. This contains collated fastenings if supported by the server.

After all entries required have been returned, the server then responds with an &IQ; result containing a <fin/> element qualified by &ns;. This contains the RSM data, a total count of conversation entries within the inbox, a count of conversations with unread messages, and a total count of unread messages.

Any counter of unread SHOULD be accurate, however client implementors please note that due to heuristics involved and other issues these counters can be inaccurate at times.

A client MAY at any time set a conversation as marked by sending an &IQ; of type "set" containing something or other. This causes the server to set the "marked" flag on a conversation. A client SHOULD display a marked conversation in the same way as an unread conversation, and explicitly removed the marked flag when the conversation is considered re-read.

Removing a marked flag, even when the conversation is not currently marked, causes the unread counter for that conversation to be set to zero.

Servers MUST track which instant messages sent to clients remain unread.

An instant message is always read if it is followed by an instant message which is read.
An instant message always starts unread.
A Chat Marker (see &xep0333;) of "displayed" or "acknowledged" causes the message to be read (and also causes all prior messages to be read by implication).
A Message Receipt (see &xep0184;) does not cause messages to be considered unread. Perhaps it should?
Unmarking a conversation always sets the unread counter to zero, and by implication sets all messages to be read.

Let us assume a user has only two contacts they have exchanges messages with, and a single chatroom. Asking for their inbox is simple:

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The server responds with a list of conversations:

Greetings from Alpha Centauri! ]]>

After the list of messages, the server completes its response with a the reply to the original IQ.

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TODO - Hopefully roughly given by the examples.

TODO

This XEP requires no interaction with &IANA;.

None.

The author notes that this protocol is heavily based on the mod_inbox system of MongooseIM. In addition, Kevin Smith provided useful feedback which has shaped this specification.