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Security

As Instant Messaging becomes used more and more in business environments as well as in our private lives, security becomes more and more important.  Many users don't realise that anyone with a packet sniffer and a little bit of know-how could read everything they are writing.  In order to raise user awareness of this issue, I strongly encourage you to make it plainly obvious to your users wether or not they are sending a secure message.

Each message window should have a well placed, obvious warning if they are sending an unencrypted message.  Don't forget that any message destined to any non-Jabber network is effectively insecure, as it will have to travel unencrypted as soon as it leave the Jabber network.

Think of this like the the Internet Explorer padlock icon, or Netscape key/broken key on steroids.  If your client doesn't support encryption then have this warning permanently on by default please.

A much needed standard for Jabber security has not yet been finalised.  In the mean time you should check out the Security Jabber Interest Group (JIG) and join the mailing list.