[OTR-users] Automatically refresh session when receiving unreadable message

[Jonas]

Hello,

I'm experiencing a rather annoying behavior which (in my humble opinion)
should be easy to fix and might also affect other users.

I'm using pidgin OTR with a friend who often just closes his laptop
putting it to sleep with all his programs still open. The annoying
scenario is as follows:

1. We begin a private conversation an write something.

2. My friend puts her laptop to sleep. This does not cause the private
session to end.

3. I log off from pidgin closing the private session from my side. She
is not notified since she is offline.

4. She opens her laptop again -- nothing changed for her.

5. I log in again. (You can exchange steps 4 and 5.)

6. She writes me a message. Because her pidgin thinks she still has a
private session open it is sent encrypted. I just receive "the message
is unread because you are not in a private conversation" (rough
translation, my pidgin is not in English).

7. She doesn't even notice what she's sending me is unreadable. So until
I don't manually refresh the session and ask her to resend her messages
again she continues to send unreadable messages.

In my opinion a solution to this issue would be the following:

If a client receives an unreadable message due do a non-existing private
session then:
  a) Update the session
  b) Notify the sender that the received message was unreadable
  c) (Senders side:) Resend the message

I know that this might cause problems using multiple clients with OTR
and XMPP. But for me -- as I'm only using one client -- it would greatly
improve my user experience. By having something like this as an optional
feature one could satisfy both groups of people.

Regards,
Jonas