title: XMPP: RFC on establishing mutual subscription when original requester is offline (subscribed presence)
body: <p>we've got an XMPP server <a href="http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/" rel="nofollow">(OpenFire)</a> and a custom client based on the Java Smack XMPP stack. We're using manual subscription acceptance, so clients have to exchange subscribe and subscribed presences.</p>
  
  <p>As noted in the <a href="http://xmpp.org/rfcs/rfc3921.html#substates" rel="nofollow">RFC</a>, subscribe presences ("I want to subscribe to your presences") are stored by the server and resent every time the user logs in until he answers them. Unfortunately, the same does not seem to be true for the answers ("subscribed" or "unsubscribed"). If the original requester if offline when the other users answers the subscription request, he does not receive the answer. I could not find anything in the XMPP RFC about expected behaviour of the server.</p>
  
  <p>What can I do? Is there something I might have missed? Or is there a standard way to implement this use case?</p>
  
  <p><a href="http://community.igniterealtime.org/message/171421#171421" rel="nofollow">This OpenFire forum post</a> suggests that the behaviour I'm experiencing is the desired one...</p>
  
  <p>Thanks for all pointers,
  Florian</p>