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

[Ian Goldberg]

On Fri, May 02, 2014 at 11:21:57PM +0200, Jonas wrote:
> 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.

If I understand your scenario correctly that's what used to happen in
pidgin-otr 3.x.  I thought that behaviour didn't change in 4.x, but it
could be that, as you say, the interaction with the "don't go insane
when people log in more than once" feature of pidgin-otr 4.x could have
interacted with it.

What OS, pidgin, and pidgin-otr versions are each of you using?

   - Ian