Daniel Gultsch, creator of “Conversations”, visits mailbox.org

Our XMPP chat service has been around for a while and its age is now showing, as support for some features is missing our out of date. Who better to ask for advice than Daniel Gultsch, creator of the popular XMPP app „Conversations“, which incidentally, is being widely used by our own team here at mailbox.org.

Daniel did not just develop the XMPP client app https://conversations.im, he also operates an XMPP chat server and offers related hosting solutions to his customer base. Enabling and maintaining free and secure communication over the Internet is a mission that is as important to him as it is to us. We are grateful for his assistance and enjoy the open and cooperative spirit of our collaborative work.

Peer Heinlein and Daniel Gultsch originally met at conference events. Daniel was subsequently invited to Berlin and took us up on the offer to run an XMPP training workshop for our team of mailbox.org administrators, which has delivered many valuable insights. The facilitation of secure communication and privacy was frequently at the heart of the discussion, and our helpdesk colleagues contributed their experiences from frontline technical support to the debate. It was also important to us to consider the kinds of obstacles and problems that our users have reported. Among other things, this has helped us gain a deeper understanding of the XMPP encryption mechanism OMEMO, for example.

Another result of the workshop was that we decided to replace our old XMPP server software Prosody with ejabberd in the future. A first prototype of the new XMPP server was set up together with Daniel and the final implementation and testing will be completed in the coming weeks. However, there is still a lot to be done and it will be some time before we can finally switch over to the new server software on our live systems.

Our users are also in for a nice surprise! At this point, we will only say that Daniel has helped us address an issue that has been close to our heart and present on our wishlist for a long time. We look forward to telling you more in the near future.

People in the picture from left to right: Jakob (SysAdmin Mail/OX), Sven Meyer (Helpdesk), Peer Doil (SysAdmin Mail/OX), Daniel Gultsch (Conversations), Berlin Bear, Peer Heinlein (CEO), Ivonne Heinlein (Management)