Downtime announcement

We will migrate the server from the old infrastructure to the new one, on Thursday, November 30th, between 8:00 and 11:00 UTC. Please expect a few hours of downtime until everything is settled!

The migration will also include an upgrade to prosody 0.12 and the deactivation of TLS v1.0 and v1.1 in favor of TLS v1.3.

Update:

• The migration has been completed at 9:00 UTC.
• We have re-enabled TLS v1 and v1.1, as those are still in active use.
• We have removed offline messages archives for accounts with no activity in the last year.

/Update

Many thanks go to boerde.de for being our home for the last decade, and for enduring a few DDoS attacks on our behalf. Additional thanks go to AS250 for offering us a new home.

Ten years review

We started the service on Debian Squeeze with the freshly released Prosody 0.9 on it. Since then, there were quite a few upgrades of both the OS and of prosody. However, for technical reasons, the server is currently running on a prosody development snapshot that predates the current 0.12 major update.

In that time we’ve grown significantly, and are currently processing on average 100 thousand messages and 6.3 million presence stanzas every day.

Back in 2013, we were quite avantgarde to support not only TLSv1.0, but also v1.1 and v1.2. The support was only added into Android with the 4.1 release in 2012 and wasn’t enabled by default until 2014 with Android 5. Now we are lagging behind, given that TLS v1.3 came with Android 10 four years ago.

IRC transports

Since 2017, we are operating a beta (internal only) biboumi IRC transport on irc.yax.im and two dedicated transports for IRCnet on ircnet.yax.im and for euIRC on euirc.yax.im.

These were never officially announced and have just a few users. They will be migrated to the new host as well, but with a lower priority.

Spam fighting efforts

The XMPP spam problem has been a significant annoyance to most users. We have the opinion that XMPP spam can be best fought at the server level, where aggregate views and statistics are available, and spam can be blocked centrally for all users with mod_firewall.

In 2017, we have implemented spam detection and prevention both for yax.im users and against spam bots registered on our server. In 2020, we extended that to auto-quarantine suspicious account creations.

In the last two weeks, our spam fighting efforts have blocked 21.000 spam messages from 7.600 accounts on 72 servers, including 480 auto-flagged bot accounts on yax.im. We were not explicitly keepig note, but the number of auto-flagged accounts since the measure was introduced in 2020 is around 30.000.

As part of the JabberSPAM initiative, we have helped report abuse and bring down unmaintained spam relays.

Future

With the new hosting platform and our committed team of three administrators, we are ready to take on the challenges of the future and to sustain the growth of our user base.

This has brought us hundreds of new users (per day) and a significant amount of new traffic from the notifications, sometimes up to 200 messages per second. The additional traffic load caused some short service interruptions in the last days, and we are working together with the VaxBot team on implementing mitigations.

The VaxBot service started in mid-March in Massachusetts, and is slowly expanding to more and more states, hoping to also spread over the ocean. It was even featured on TV (archive links for EU citizens: FOX5, WBTV)!

This has lead to a significant uptick in yax.im account registrations, as can be seen in this graph:

Once a user registers with VaxBot, it will automatically send them appointment notifications for their region as soon as they become available.

This means that for each potential appointment, a message will be sent to each registered user in the region. When a large chain opens up additional capacities, thousands of messages will be generated and sent out in a burst.

As those are chat messages, they need to be stored in the respective user’s account, delivered to online devices, and forwarded to the respective push service to wake up a mobile device.

Due to how the server is processing messages, a large message flood from one connection can “capture” the processor for multiple seconds or even longer, leading to the starvation of other connections, causing delivery delays and even disconnects.

As a preliminary measure, we have implemented a rate limiting mechanism to reduce the impact of message bursts from VaxBot, and we are working on optimizing the number of messages generated by the bot and on increasing the server performance to be able to further scale up.

A long-term solution based on XEP-0060: Publish-Subscribe would be interesting and probably much more efficient for the infrastructure, but that would require significant changes to all clients, and vaccination can not wait.

Registrations on the server already were limited to a small number of new accounts per IP address per hour, to prevent large amounts of automated registrations. However, spammers circumvented that for some time already by using open proxy servers on the Internet to create thousands of accounts.

Starting last week, we are putting accounts that use open proxy servers into quarantine, where they are limited to contacting the server support and to kindly ask to be unblocked. Users affected by the quarantine will receive a message with a link to the support chat as well as a link explaining why their IP address was blocked:

Trying to contact anyone else will result in errors shown to the user:

Behind the scenes, we are using a Real time Blackhole List to identify accounts for the quarantine, based on this prosody setup. We are aware that it will affect legitimate anonymisation proxy users, and we are very sorry about that. There might be only a dozen of actual for-hire spammers on XMPP, but their impact on our ecosystem is staggering.

As the server is operated by volunteers, we do not have a 24/7 support team, so please be patient when requesting an unblocking.

The issue happened on Friday, 2020-04-23, at 07:38 UTC, and continued until today, 2020-04-27, 16:29 UTC. Due to lack of automatic monitoring, it was not discovered sooner. We are currently investigating the root cause (and also monitoring the database connection very closely).

As the fallback “offline storage” mechanism was not affected, users should receive all messages on at least one of their devices.

The primary reason why this change became necessary is that the previous version of mod_push_appserver (the XEP-0357: Push server for yaxim users) was using synchronous calls to Google FCM to wake up yaxim. This blocked all message processing on yax.im for a brief moment, or for many seconds when there were issues with the network connection to Google’s servers. As asynchronous requests are only sufficiently supported in prosody-trunk, it was required to drop support for older prosody versions in mod_push_appserver, which has happened with the 4.0 release.

On top of that, with the new version it is also possible to further optimize mobile battery usage (mod_cache_c2s_caps) and to upgrade the service to the Lua 5.3 runtime with better server-side memory efficiency (it is currently running on 5.2). These changes will be implemented in the coming days / weeks when the operation has proved as stable otherwise.

Material Design

Starting with this version, yaxim follows Google’s “Material Design” style. To comply with last year’s strictened Google Play publishing requirements, we had to replace the deprecated ActionBarSherlock library with Google’s own appcompat, which provides the Material style.

This also means that yaxim now requires at least an Android 4.0 device. As 4.0 was released in 2011, this only affects a single-digit number of devices. Users with a ten years old phone need to stay with older yaxim versions, which run on Android 2.3+.

Furthermore, on Android 6+ devices, the user will be asked to grant permission at the moment when they are actually needed (i.e. when sharing a file or taking a photo).

On Android 8+, the new notification channels are used by yaxim. A new channel will be created for each contact with a custom ringtone. Once you receive a message from such a contact, you need to use the Android notification settings to change the ringtone, though.

Even Easier Easy Onboarding

yaxim 0.9 introduced Easy XMPP, using the purely client-side XEP-0379: Pre-Authenticated Roster Subscription, which required a server with active In-Band Registration.

The new XEP-0401: Easy User Onboarding allows you to invite new users to your server without being abused by spammers.

Here, you can see a poezio user on a prosody server creating an invitation that is used by yaxim to register and auto-add the inviter:

The invitation page in the example is making use of Google Play Install Referrers to let the newly installed yaxim know the inviter’s address, which has a privacy impact, and therefore is not rolled out to the official landing page yet.

Chat Rooms

There is a new view of your (bookmarked) rooms and a browser of public rooms powered by search.jabber.network.

Your nickname (“display name”) is now synchronized to the server using XEP-0172: User Nickname, and you can change it in the account settings.

Service Discovery and Matrix Support

The room browser can also be used to discover services by entering a valid XMPP address into the search field:

This is not limited to servers and rooms, you can also search for users, chat with them and add them to your contact list:

While initially introduced as an April Fools’ Day joke, Matrix support (using the Bifröst bridge is now actually integrated into yaxim, using the official bridge on matrix.org, which has also been made ready for FOSDEM 2020.

Reliable Messaging

For users who are using yaxim in parallel to another client, the new support for XEP-0313: Message Archive Management (MAM) is good news. When connecting to the server, yaxim will now activate MAM and request all messages since the last synchronization. This will ensure that yaxim receives all messages which already were delivered to the other client.

Furthermore, when installed on devices with Google Play Services, yaxim will register for XEP-0357: Push Notifications via the push.yax.im server. This will ensure that the app is woken up from deep sleep or launched when somebody sends you a new message.

These important changes are also reflected in the app privacy policy.

Under the Hood Changes

The internal chat message database has been optimized by adding database indexes for all frequent operations, making yaxim much faster at loading chat windows with long histories.

Furthermore, yaxim was upgraded from the ancient Smack 3 to the Smack 4.3.x XMPP library.

Road to 1.0

This release brings significant changes, and we had hoped to be able to finalize even more to make a glamorous and exciting 1.0 release for the 10 years anniversary. However, the current code base brings some major improvements for reliability and usability and we did not want to hold them back even further.

More work is needed on the contacts view, to allow sorting by conversation age and to quickly search your contacts. Furthermore, the creation of rooms and inviting your friends into them need to be integrated.

MAM was long overdue, and for now only your private messages are queried for. Room history is still obtained using the legacy mechanism, meaning that sometimes, you might miss out on parts of room history.

The embedded image view does not have proper caching, and it will attempt to load any attachment, regardless its size and whether it can be displayed in yaxim. This needs to be restructured in a way that limits downloads to actual image files of a certain maximum size.

2009: The Beginning

Back in 2009, the Android platform was still brand new, and it was lacking a Free IM client. There were rumors and announcements, but nobody had posted working code yet.

The first specific hint was a German slide deck by Sven and Chris, presenting their semester project, YAXIM - Yet Another XMPP Instant Messenger.

Some friendly emails later, a GitHub project got created, and the coding went on. At the end of the year, a lightning talk was given at the 26C3, showing how yaxim looked back then:

In the early days, it was a huge challenge to reliably deliver messages, and things were improving only slowly.

Significant Steps

In 2010, YAXIM got renamed into yaxim, to look more like a name and less like a yelling acronym.

In 2013, Bruno was launched as yaxim’s cute little sibling, to appeal to children and everybody who loves animals. It has attained almost 2000 active fans by now.

Also in 2013, the yax.im XMPP service was launched, mainly to make on-boarding from yaxim and Bruno easier, but also to have a stable and reliable service usable for mobile clients.

Finally, in 2016, yaxim got its current yak-oriented logo.

A Review In Numbers

From day 1, yaxim was more or less a hobby project, with no commercial backing and no full time developers. Over the years, the code base has grown slowly, with 2015 being an especially slow year.

Some contributors were more active than others… 😉

Even though yaxim still has more total installs on Google Play than Conversations, the latter is said to be the go-to client on Android, and very popular among federation nerds. Still, at least in the last three years, there was no decline in the number of devices that yaxim is installed on (Google doesn’t provide stats before 2016):

Current Challenges

The technical foundation of yaxim (Smack 3.x, ActionBarSherlock) became rather dated, and currently much effort is going into making yaxim look great on modern (Material design) Android devices, and to support modern features like interactive permission dialogs and battery saving, as well as the Matrix (with the support being currently dormant.

Please check out the Google Play beta channel to stay up-to-date with the most recent developments, and let’s see how the next decade will develop!

The yax.im XMPP service is running on the host xmpp.yaxim.org and uses SRV records to let clients know the actual host name. However, a certain percentage of clients (around 11%) are running on IT infrastructure from the last century and fail to obtain those SRV records. These clients fall back to connecting directly to the yax.im host instead.

To accomodiate the clients, we are using HAProxy and mod_net_proxy to properly forward the connections from the web server to the XMPP server.

After the upgrade to prosody 0.11, mod_net_proxy failed to accept new connections from HAProxy, so that clients not using SRV were caught in an infinite “Connecting…” loop. Unfortunately, this was not detected by our technical monitoring, and only was brought up recently by an administrator’s relative.

The communication between HAProxy and mod_net_proxy has been restored today, and the service should be fully available from now on. We will also improve our monitoring to make sure that similar problems are detected in time in the future.

Starting today, yaxim is switching its protocol foundation from the deprecated exchange of clumsy and inefficient XML streams to the modern and elegant combination of HTTP and JSON/REST, the Matrix protocol.

Protocol History and Comparison

The XMPP protocol celebrated its 20th birthday early this year. The Matrix followed two months later and is currently in the middle of its own celebration. Some fifteen years later, a small company decided to use the strong brand value of the Matrix name to reinvent XMPP with a modern facade.

Evil voices claim that MATRIX stands for Monolithic, Awefully Trendy Re-Implementation of XMPP, and there is some truth to this, if we compare the words of the respective founding fathers:

Jabber is a new project I recently started to create a complete open-source platform for Instant Messaging with transparent communication to other IM systems(ICQ, AIM, etc).

I think they missed the bit where Matrix is called Matrix because it bridges (matrixes) the existing networks (Slack, IRC, Telegram, Discord, XMPP, etc) in, rather than needing to convince everyone to join.

However, the Matrix protocol has outgrown Vector Ltd, there is a version 1.0 0.4 specification, and even a Matrix.org Foundation.

This is much superior to XMPP, which is based on some arcane specifications maintained by a bunch of grey beards, plus a separate organisation for protocol extensions. In addition, Matrix supports working over 100 bits per second connections, while XMPP only gives you 75 bps.

The monolithic protocol is another huge advantage compared to many hundreds of optional extensions, and the rumors of Matrix fragmentation are a blatant lie.

Enter the Matrix

Therefore, the yaxim developers have decided to take the blue pill, to move forward, and to use the better and more modern and mobile friendly polling based HTTP scheme. Starting with the current beta release, you can enter Matrix chat rooms and talk to users on the Matrix.

The legacy XMPP protocol is remaining in the release for now, but will be removed in the near future to reduce the bloat of yaxim. You will be able to migrate your contacts to your new Matrix account by using the Bifröst bridge.

In parallel, we are working on switching yax.im from prosody to Synapse. The data transition is already completed, and we are only waiting for the data center provider to add 512GB of RAM to the machine before we can switch over.

In the last months, we have worked out how this affects the Jabber ecosystem. This work has resulted in the creation of new service policies for the yax.im service, which become effective today.

Privacy Policy

Our Privacy Policy describes in detail what information is stored about you, how long it is stored and how it is shared with other parties.

We are only storing and processing your information to:

• provide the service you explicitly want (send and receive messages and files, participate in chatrooms etc.)
• fight Jabber spam (this is a huge problem!)
• ensure that our server operates properly

We do not create profiles of our users or try to monetize the data in any way.

Terms of Service

Our Terms of Service have moved to their own page, and we have made more explicit that you may not use our server for illegal things or to send spam.

Other Changes

To improve our (your!) data footprint, we are disabling the following functions:

• Disqus comments (they used to be nice a loooong time ago).
• Direct buttons for Twitter and flattr.
• Infinite storage of uploaded user files.

Measures

Many public servers have adopted a policy to silently block messages from strangers. This is problematic for two reasons: First, it breaks the expectation of communication - you can’t just send a message to somebody, you first need to ask them to become you friend (and to see their online status). Second, it is not apparent to you when you send a message - you don’t receive a response, and not even an error message. You can only guess whether the message got delivered or not.

The yax.im server is using a custom mod_firewall rule-set to detect and reject spam messages, both from and to accounts on yax.im. If you send a message that does not pass the spam filter, you will receive an error message (“Blocked due to abuse”).

The filter will flag certain automatic messages (like server monitoring notifications) as spam. If you are running a bot on yax.im, please ensure that all users who want to receive such notifications add the bot as their contact.

Furthermore, accounts registered on yax.im for the purpose of sending spam will be terminated immediately, and all accounts registered from the same IP address will be flagged and reviewed.

The rule-set is updated periodically to reflect changes in the spam transmissions. Feel free to contact the server operators to learn more.

Advice to Public Server Operators

If you run a server with public registration, please consider this advice: Don’t do it!

Seriously, running a public server is a time-consuming job, and if you don’t take the time to monitor and disable spammer accounts, you quickly become a liability for the whole XMPP ecosystem by annoying thousands of users (on other servers). It is perfectly fine to run a server for your friends and family, and to invite them individually.

If you insist on running a public server, please take the following measures:

• Limit and monitor In-Band-Registration
• Protect account registration with a CAPTCHA, phone number validation or other means that are hard to cheat
• Throttle the number of messages you accept from local users, especially to non-contacts
• Provide XEP-0157: Contact Addresses for XMPP Services so that other admins can contact you

Thank you for observing all safety precautions.

The release also provides a number of long-awaited improvements like Easy XMPP, Group chats, Android Auto, a new design and much much more.

Easy XMPP

Most XMPP clients are impossible to use for normal people. Usability is a hard problem, and making a federated protocol from the early 2000ies usable is even more so. Now, yaxim provides significant improvements:

1. Install the app and create an account by just typing your desired user name. A secure password will be auto-generated (and you can overwrite it in the prefs):

   

2. You can invite friends using the new “Create Invitation” feature:

   

   You can share the invitation link via QR-code, e-mail, SMS or any other means, and your friend will either see a friendly landing page (source), or immediately get the link opened in yaxim:

   

   Because yaxim is the first client to support XEP-0379: Pre-Authenticated Roster Subscription, it will automatically approve and add your friend.

   You can also directly use Android Beam™ to share your own or any contact’s address, by touching your devices back-to-back.

3. It comes with technical foundation to support Easy Group Chats:

Group Chats

Support for Group Chats (also known as XEP-0045: Multi-User Chat or MUC) has been wished for for a long time, and it was in the works for multiple years, culminating in something that is finally usable.

The recommended way to participate is to get invited into a Group Chat by a friend (unfortunately, inviting friends isn’t yet supported directly in yaxim). You will get an invitation notification and can participate:

Of course it is also possible to manually join a known MUC, however this behavior is frowned upon, because typing JIDs is boring:

A future release will provide a “seamless” flow to create groups for Cat Pictures, Christmas planning or Business Matters, and help you invite all the right people, as outlined in Easy Group Chats.

Android Auto (and Wear)

To improve the usability of yaxim in more-mobile-than-mobile scenarios, we have added support for Android Auto and Android Wear. If you connect your Auto/Wear enabled device to your smartphone and install the appropriate companion app, you will be able to receive message notifications from yaxim and respond accordingly.

Android Auto will display the sender and read aloud the message content, allowing to dictate a response or send back “I’m driving”:

On Wear, you can read the actual message, dictate the response or jump into the app:

P.S: Starting with Android 5 and Auto 2, you can run AA directly on your phone screen when using an appropriate phone mount.

New Design

Consistent with the new yax.im look featuring Yaks, we have redesigned the app logo and branding:

Notifications also include the new icon, so the time of the red-white-yellow ninja chicken is over:

What’s Next

It might be a bit pathetic to outline the future plans in a release that has taken over two years to complete, but still, it’s important to share our thoughts and ideas.

Let’s first recapitulate our past promises from 0.8.6 and 0.8.7:

• We have finally tackled MUCs (as asked in 2011 and promised in 2013) \o/

• It looks like Android tablets aren’t much of a thing, and neither is Android TV. There hasn’t been much demand regarding big screen support, and there are no current plans.

• End-to-end encryption is now called XEP-0384: OMEMO (#197), we will address it in a future release. Hopefully. Just run your own private and trusted server already!

The XMPP world has changed in the last two years. The most important plans now are:

• Make XMPP even easier (and improve yaxim accordingly)!

• Implement XEP-0363: HTTP File Upload: #196 - high priority!

• Implement XEP-0313: Message Archive Management: #98 - medium priority

• Implement User Avatars - maybe…

• Boring maintenance work (Currently yaxim uses content providers and databases for everything, including user presence. This makes for a very laggy experience when connecting, and needs to be cleaned up. This will be a major redesign of the internals, but it will make future improvements much easier and faster).

On 2016-07-27, the service was upgraded to the experimental prosody 0.10 branch, to allow support for XEP-0313: Message Archive Management and for its better MUC implementation.

Unfortunately, the upgrade also introduced prosody bug #724, where a logic error causes new user registrations to fail, except for spammer accounts. Because the yax.im admin was not aware of this and failed to see the signs of stagnation as well as angry user reports, it took over three months to find and fix the issue. Sorry!

The good news is: yax.im is accepting new users again! If you are running yaxim and your registration attempt has failed, please uninstall & reinstall the app or clear the app data to perform a new registration.

To support DNSSEC, we are moving the yax.im and yaxim.org domains to a different set of nameservers. It looks like the old nameservers for yax.im stopped resolving the domain before the 72h transition period was over; a support ticked has been opened for this. Please bear with us (or flush your resolver cache) until the issue has been fixed.

Please update immediately to 0.8.8 (ChangeLog, commit history)!

Man-in-the-Middle Vulnerability

yaxim has fallen victim to the problem known as CVE-2014-5075, allowing attackers to hook into the connection between yaxim and your server, and to read all your data (including your XMPP password!).

It is not known if this vulnerability has ever been exploited in the wild. Thereforeyou should immediately upgrade yaxim and change your XMPP server password. The latter can also be accomplished using yaxim 0.8.8.

New Password Change Dialog

Previous versions of yaxim only allowed changing the password stored in yaxim, not the one on the server.

Because changing your XMPP password is an important security element, and the embarrassing security vulnerability that existed in yaxim over the last years forces the author to make it possible, the password change dialog now incorporates the ability to change your password locally and on the server:

If you only want to change the password in yaxim, but not on the server, just untick the box:

Because the XMPP password is stored in yaxim’s (unencrypted) preferences, and most users do not remember their XMPP password anyway, this mechanism does not require entering the old password. If you consinder this a security problem, please do not give your smartphone to potential pranksters.

On related news, the startup wizard also requires to re-enter the password when registering a new account.

Other Security Improvements

As of now, yaxim will try to use TLSv1.2 or TLSv1.1 first, on Android 4.0 and later. Older Android devices are limited to TLSv1 unfortunately. SSLv3 will not be accepted any more, in accordance with current recommendations.

Furthermore, with this release it is no longer possible for third-party apps on your phone to access yaxim’s contact list or chat history. This issue was reported by Tarek Saier and is incorporated in 0.8.8.

Improvements have been made to the packet queue handling with XEP-0198, helping with very laggy connections.

User Interface Changes

The status dialog has been revamped by Joerg Mensmann. Now it features colorful icons in the status drop down menu as well as auto-completion for your old status messages:

A new setting allows to disable contact group display, moving all your contacts into one large group.

Furthermore, the “OK” button to send chat messages has been finally aligned to the bottom of the window, so it no longer moves up if you type a long chat message, and there is a new “huge” setting for the chat window font.

The 0.8.7 release was timed for the XMPP Summit, and contained some little issues, which have been fixed since then. Many thanks go to the sedulous testers who contributed detailed problem reports.

Server Connection

A long-standing bug, where yaxim vehemently refused to reconnect to the server under certain conditions has been finally found and solved: when yaxim was configured for a server with SRV records (like yax.im) and the yaxim app was restarted by the OS when no network connection was available (or the SRV lookup failed for other reasons), yaxim always tried to connect to the service name, port 5222, until the app was stopped and re-started.

Some more (re)connection related issues in the XEP-0198 component have been found and fixed, including one where all contacts appeared as offline.

A new timeout mechanism for ongoing connection and disconnection attempts has been added, requiring a connection to be created successfully within 30 seconds.

When an invalid JID was configured by the user, or a custom port was set without a custom server name, yaxim crashed (#97). Now, the preference dialog is opened instead.

User Interface Changes

The preference and account preference dialogs have been fixed to properly display the action bar, including the “home” navigation button.

Furthermore, the distracting “yaxim: example@yax.im” popup in the status bar, that appeared on every connection change, has been removed. This also improves the user experience for smartwatch users (#123).

In the last months, several big takeovers happened in the Instant Messaging world. Facebook bought Instagram and WhatsApp (but failed to get Snapchat), Rakuten got Viber, and Tango was bought by China’s Alibaba. We at yaxim used the exciting growth that followed the start of the yax.im service to unite with Booz Allen Hamilton, a strong partner that greatly values our assets.

Monetizing yaxim’s Values

With each news line of billions of US dollars changing hands for proprietary chat services, the yaxim team got more and more interested in monetizing a solution that is based on Free and Open Source technologies. However, without proprietary technology, secret scalability sauce, and other magic ingredients, the only valuable asset we had at our hands was your user data.

Fortunately for us, the number of users grew by a factor of 20 since the yax.im service was publicly announced. You, our loyal users, contributed to this success – and we consider it our honor and civil duty to transfer ownership of your data into the hands of a new, strong, partner.

About Booz Allen Hamilton

Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH) is a publicly traded North-American corporation with a strong background in security services, which perfectly matches yaxim’s goals (security, transparency). On the other hand, yaxim’s international placement is a good match to BAH’s announced plans to expand overseas and to bring peace and freedom to the Middle-East. Last, but not least, BAH are known for employing awesome people like Edward Snowden.

What Changes for You?

We have undertaken significant effort to make the transfer of ownership completely transparent for you, our dear users. The strongest benefit you are going to experience will be the existence of decentralized backup copies of all relevant data in Fort Meade as well as in Utah.

On the other hand, however, there will be a decline in yaxim development and slower reactions to service downtimes with yax.im, mainly due to the bad Internet connectivity on the new Caribbean island owned and inhabited by the yax.im administrators.

This release comes with some long-awaited features, like Stream Management, proper roster handling, improved error display and better internationalization.

Stream Management

Support for XEP-0198: Stream Management was planned since 2009 and deferred many times due to technical challenges and a lack of time. Finally, it is there, and working well against prosody 0.9 servers with mod_smacks enabled. Whenever your Android switches between WiFi and 3G, yaxim is interrupted for some seconds, but restores the session immediately – no messages are lost!

In the future, the code will be merged back into the SMACK library to allow other Android clients to benefit from seamless session resumption.

Roster Management

Prior to 0.8.7, yaxim’s default policy for incoming buddy request was to silently accept them. Yes, you read right. The authors are very ashamed of this fact, and it was due time to change the state of affairs.

With the current release, incoming requests are displayed in the roster, and a dialog pops up when you tap them:

Carbon Notifications

The XEP-0280: Message Carbons support introduced in 0.8.6 made your phone noisy when you were chatting from another client, as it beeped on every incoming message copy. To stop this annoyance, the notification behavior has been changed as follows:

• messages you send from your other client are silently added to yaxim’s log
• when yaxim receives the first message copy, it makes a sound
• further message copies are silently added to the log, until you open the chat window
• messages directly sent to yaxim always cause a sound

At the same time, the XEP-0184: Delivery Status of copied messages is now also correctly tracked in the chat log.

Error Messages

If an error stanza is received for an outgoing message, earlier versions of yaxim silently ignored it. The authors were made aware of the problem by @das_aug, and #108 was promptly fixed:

The exact error message is only displayed in a notification – there is no place for it in the context of the chat message, yet. This will be changed in one of the next releases.

Internationalization

As of 0.8.7, yaxim supports Internationalized Domain Names for server addresses. In earlier releases, you had to manually enter the punycode into the custom server field. In the latest release, IDNA names are supported in the JID field as well as for custom server names.

Right-to-Left languages are also supported as of now for roster entries, messages and the interface. However at the time of writing, the only available RTL translation is Hebrew, thanks to Darlan from Gajim:

Please contribute some more!

What’s Next

From the 0.8.6 release wishlist, only XEP-0198 has been implemented. MUC support will be worked on next, we promise!

Other TODOs:

• a Tablet UI with the contacts list on the side of a chat view
• end-to-end encryption, either with OTR or with GnuPG.
• more user-friendlyness! \o/

With great pleasure we want to announce a new public service brought to you by yaxim.org - the yax.im (read: Yaks’ IM) public XMPP server.

To register with it, open your XMPP client (e.g. yaxim), choose a JID of your liking that ends with @yax.im, like test@yax.im and activate “Register new account”.

Server Details

The service is running the recent Prosody 0.9 XMPP server written in Lua. Many thanks go to the dedicated Prosody developers.

yax.im is reachable via IPv4 and IPv6 (if your client does not support SRV resolution, use xmpp.yaxim.org as the server name, port 5222) and is hosted in Berlin, Germany. It features several extensions important for mobile clients:

• XEP-0198: Stream Management for mobile client connections
• XEP-0199: XMPP Ping set to ping you every 5 minutes, with a 2 minutes timeout
• XEP-0280: Message Carbons for keeping multiple parallel client connections in sync

Certain JIDs are barred from registration (you need to specify at least two letters, and test and admin, among some others, are disallowed).

Transports and Services

So far, yax.im offers a built-in XEP-0045: MUC component at chat.yax.im with the yax.im service and yaxim app support chat room yaxim@chat.yax.im. Feel free to bother us with any issues you might have with either the app or the server.

The server is not offering any transports. This might change if a transport implementation for XMPP or any proprietary service appears that has a credible security audit.

In the meantime, you are free to use whatever external transport you are used to.

After almost four year of development, we are proud to announce that yaxim, our Open Source XMPP client, is sufficiently mature to fulfill even the needs of large corporate customers. And like with any project that grows from your garage to become a viable product, the day comes when its commercial future needs to be set.

Starting Tuesday, yaxim will adapt its pricing to the competitive levels set by the Mobile Network Operators with their new Rich Communication Services (also known as joyn™). However, there is no need to worry. For most of our loyal customers, the free Basic plan will be more than sufficient. For other customers, we offer the Standard, Advanced and Professional plans at reasonable monthly rates.

With the beginning of the next business week, the following pricing model will be rolled out (all prices are in US Dollar, international offers will be scaled appropriately). All users will automatically be enrolled in the Basic plan, and have the option to purchase additional messages and roster capacity or switch to one of the paid plans via in app purchase.

Basic plan (free)

The Basic plan includes all that is needed for most users, and it is free!

¹⁾ Unused units expire at the end of the calendar month.
²⁾ Receiving messages is not limited, but no notifications will be displayed after you received 50 incoming messages.

Standard plan (5.99 $ / month)

The Standard plan includes the typical amount of messages for more sophisticated users, at a reasonable rate.

¹⁾ Unused units expire at the end of the calendar month.
²⁾ Receiving messages is not limited, but no notifications will be displayed after you received 500 incoming messages.

Advanced plan (14.99 $ / month)

The Advanced plan is meant for users who value their communication privacy.

¹⁾ Unused units expire at the end of the calendar month.

Professional plan (39.99 $ / month)

The Professional plan provides unlimited communication freedom.