[OTR-dev] OTR, Pidgin & Guaranteed message delivery

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 5:11 AM, Ian Goldberg <ian at cypherpunks.ca> wrote:
> So yes, we could add a reliability layer on top of whatever IM network
> we have, but I personally think that's out of scope.  If you really want
> a reliable IM network, you can just use one, no?

Perhaps, but I could counter with "if you want a IM network with
deniable authentication and encryption, just use one". Really,
reliability can only be accomplished end to end. Though its certainly
feasible to have an IM protocol that does end to end reliablity, I'm
not sure if any do.

The most common case that I deal with is having no idea if the last
message made it through or if perhaps the far end dropped out first, I
already use OTR to improve things here: I ask OTR to refresh the
private conversation and if its successful it's likely that the
channel is still working and the last message made it through.  Though
this isn't always the case, since the channel could have dropped and
recovered.