When using a non-standard authentication mechanism, users can be created ‘on demand’, meaning that a User object is created when an authentication attempt was successful.

With this in mind, a particular ‘user’ can ‘exist’ (somewhere in the realm), before its User representation object is created in Openfire in some scenarios. This is triggered by Openfire not being able to detect that the particular user is a local, registered user (until that user authenticates for the first time)

Currently, Openfire will drop data that is sent to users for which no User object exists. This includes (but is not limited to data related to:

• subscription requests

• offline messages

Openfire should allow (possibly through configuration) for data sent to a not yet existing user to be stored, instead of dropped, in a manner that allows the user to retrieve the data as soon as they log in for the first time.

Conceptually, data sent to these ‘future’ users should be handled as if they were sent to an offline user, instead of a non-existing user.

This should not affect handling of data that is sent to users on other domains than the local domain (although it should affect handling of data that is sent by remote users to not-yet-existing local users).