> Doesn't the protocol already need to do something to support that? Presumably it's an out-of-band notification, and they needed to add support for that. Yep,

> Doesn't the protocol already need to do something to support that? Presumably it's an out-of-band notification, and they needed to add support for that. Yep, it does, so you could do this; the problem for the Linux desktop is just that there isn't a standardized out-of-band push notification system yet. (I saw another commenter mention UnifiedPush, which sounds interesting - in any case it's not widely supported yet.) > As a side note, Jabber did add an in-band way as you suggest It's been a while since I looked into this in detail, but IIRC Jabber generally doesn't have a server-side way to determine which messages should notify? As I recall, the protocol was designed with smart clients and dumb servers in mind, though I'm sure some of that has changed over time - but that design decision doesn't lend itself as well to clients on battery-constrained devices. Although with that said, the fact that you aren't required to be in the same set of MUCs on every device helps in battery-constrained devices; for example I only stay joined to the rooms that my friends are in from my phone, unless I need to join another one temporarily.