Google has added offline messaging support for GTalk a feature that has been common place in other XMPP messaging services. Jean-Louis Seguineau is amazed that Google needs the GMail inbox with chat history enabled in order to make the service work. “In short, to capture the last message sent to someone who has just disconnected, Google needs to capture your entire chat history in real time,” says the XMPP/Jabber Guru. Hmmm!
This is obviously a crock. They still haven’t added this feature even today. If you send a message from another server to an offline gmail.com contact, it says “server does not provide this service”. I’ve tested this dozens of times on my own account because I’m planning to move everything to Google’s server once they support this feature.