Glossia is designed for the worst conditions first: slow networks, expensive data, connections that come and go, and phones that are off more often than they are on. Messages wait in mailboxes until their recipient collects them, for up to thirty days.
Mailboxes
A mailbox relay stores each message until the recipient’s client acknowledges it, then deletes it. Messages not collected within thirty days are deleted unread. Since 4.0, each mailbox is replicated to a second mailbox relay chosen by the recipient, so that one relay failing does not leave messages stranded.
What makes 4.0 faster
- Fewer round trips. A client reconnecting to its entry relay presents a session resumption token and can send immediately, instead of repeating a full handshake. Tokens expire after twenty-four hours, and at once when a device is unlinked.
- Resumable transfers. An attachment interrupted halfway resumes from the last complete chunk instead of starting again.
- Batched acknowledgements. A client collecting many messages acknowledges them in one packet instead of one each.
- Smaller headers. The routing header shrank by a third, which matters most on the slowest links.
Together these changes make delivery up to forty percent faster on slow and intermittent connections. The post-quantum handshake adds about 2.3 KiB to the first message of a new conversation, and nothing to the messages after it.
| Connection | Glossia 3.9 | Glossia 4.0 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Good broadband | 0.9 s | 0.8 s | 11% faster |
| Congested mobile | 3.8 s | 2.6 s | 32% faster |
| Slow 2G | 9.4 s | 5.7 s | 39% faster |
| Intermittent, 30% packet loss | 21.0 s | 12.8 s | 39% faster |
Push notifications
On phones, a client may ask the platform’s push service to wake it when a message arrives. The push service learns that the device received something, and when, but not from whom or what. Clients MUST offer a mode that turns push notifications off entirely and collects messages on a schedule instead, at some cost in battery life.