Feb. 23, 2012, 8:26 p.m. by mati

Update: Around 60% voted for encryption of s2s connections. We have thus left encryption enabled and connection to Google Talk is no longer possible, until Google fixes their servers. We found that there are connection problems with gmail.com because we require server-to-server encryption. Both are desirable, so we seek your opinion until March 11 in this poll. Read on for a more detailed explanation.

The problem

As you may know, you can chat with users on other servers (such as the ones from our list) with your jabber.at account. To make this possible, jabber.at connects to the other servers to relay messages from and to you. This connection is usually encrypted for your privacy, but you - the enduser - has no way of knowing if that is actually the case. We currently require encryption, for any server-to-server connection, so you know that all messages are encrypted. Unfortunately, gmail.com does not support encryption for server-to-server connections. This leaves us with two choices:

• Continue to require encryption with server-to-server connections. You know (that is, have to take our word for it) that all your messages are encrypted, when passed from one server to the other. The downside is that it leaves you with no gmail.com connectivity.
• Only support encryption for server-to-server connections, meaning encryption will no longer be mandatory. Most connections will still be encrypted, except those to gmail.com and maybe a few other more exotic servers. But you can never be really sure.

Please let us know what you think in our poll, it is open until March 11.