[messaging] Message delivery and revocation in Pond etc

[Tom Ritter]

On 2 April 2014 06:43, Ben Laurie <ben at links.org> wrote:
> On 31 March 2014 20:11, Ximin Luo <infinity0 at pwned.gg> wrote:
>> I'm more and more favouring the idea that, in an end-to-end-secure system, you should *not* consider a message "definitely received" by the intended recipients, until you receive an ACK from them that strongly (but perhaps indirectly) refers to the message that you sent. (With email this is a no-no but here we've already authorized the sender.)
>
> +1!
>
> I once had a bug in my XMPP server that caused it to drop ~50% of
> messages. It took a surprisingly long time and some rather odd
> conversations before anyone noticed.


Facebook somewhat recently added in a feature where, when you send a
message to a user, and you can see when they 'saw' it.

Whole idea of read receipts skeeves me out.  My software will receive
a message from you.  I may very well spend a single second glancing at
it to determine whether or not it is time-sensitive. But the fact that
you know I received it now implies that I need to get to it and reply
to it.  Or confirms conclusively that I received but chose to ignore.
I don't like my software leaking time of receipt or time of access.

-tom