Filtering Out Chat State Notifications
In XMPP you can send message stanzas whose sole purpose is to inform another user of one's present 'chat state'. For example, if one user starts writing to a contact, most clients will send that contact a chat state message telling them that their buddy is typing. These stanzas are shaped like regular message stanzas, but serve a purely informational purpose and have no message body. If your policy is designed to translate all message stanzas to emails, every single time a user starts typing a message, at least one empty email could get sent to their contact unless this filter is in place.
It is probably best to ignore any messages unless there is a 'body' element with a length greater than 0. Note that you cannot conditionally send a message based on whether chat state elements appear in the message stanza since the 'active' state can sometimes be attached to a valid message. The following exmple from XEP-0085: Chat State Notifications shows the 'active' state attached to a message.
<message
from='bernardo@shakespeare.lit/pda'
to='francisco@shakespeare.lit'
type='chat'>
<body>Who's there?</body>
<active xmlns='http://jabber.org/protocol/chatstates'/>
</message>
Find below a code snippet that filters messages based on body length:
local body = "" for n in stanza:children() do if n:name() == "body" then body = n:contents() end end if (body:len() > 0) then -- Body is greater than '0' - send this message local headers = {} local parts = {} headers["To"] = to headers["From"] = from headers["Subject"] = subject parts["text/plain"] = body local ecmsg = msys.core.ec_message_new(nil) ecmsg:build(headers,parts,nil) ecmsg:inject(from, to) return msys.xmpp.DONE end return msys.xmpp.CONT