Hello!

To sander:

""After a while, I come back and see that that person has left the network. Just went off-line. But I still have and un-answered message in my chat window, which I cannot answer using the same chat window."

I checked this scenario and it looks you still can use the same open chat window to answer the unanswered message... So, I don't think there is a problem or did I misread something?"

  -- Yes, there are both cases. Let me explain what I mean.
  If you have only ONE chat (if you are talking with only one person), you do have an ability to answer the messages even if that contact went off-line. BUT! If you have 2 or more tabs in a chat window, i.e. if you are talking with 2 or more people, you have such possibility only if the tab was active at the time the contact has left the network. So a contact leaves the network at the time you have a conversation with somebody else in another tab, you won't have an ability to use the same chat window to answer to off-line contact.
  If this explanation is not clear enough (I'm still learning English), please let me know.

"What about integrating in some way the inbox to the chat history and the short history in the chat window?"
  
-- I think that saving a "normal" messages history at least somewhere could solve this problem at some extent. But I'm not sure if this is also a violation of a standard or not.

"Additional options are *always* a bad idea if they can be avoided. "
  -- I don't agree with this statement, but I do not insist on adding any new options. I am sure such option would be convenient for me, but you are right that somebody would, probably, feel himself confused because of it. So let's not add any unnecessary options which would make the program uncomfortable to use for some users.

"I don't agree. Standards are more important than convenience to users"
 -- Well, from my own point of view, this is not always true. But again - I do not insist. If you think this is more important - let it be this way. And maybe you are completely right - after all it is a standard makers' work to make standards comfortable for users, and not yours. :)

To buzzdee:
"However, when right clicking on an offline contact, right now the chat is disabled. We could probably enable this one."
  -- Yeh, I think this could be a solution. At least a user may choose what kind of message he wants to send and sees clearly that a contact is offline and thus won't get his message immediately.
  But still I'm not sure about what kind of message can be sent to an off-line contact. Is it only "Normal message" or a "chat message" too? Won't sending a chat message to off-line user require some kind of conversion from "chat message" into "normal message" and sanding it in a form of normal message, but adding it into a chat history (because a chat window was used to compose it)?

"With regard to the history, I would leave everything as is, not mixing up message with chat history... (do we actually have a message history?)"
  -- As for me, I never use "Normal messages" directly. And my friends never do. We prefer to use a chat window for any conversation between us. But of course, if there are 2 kinds of messages, they should be stored separately (I guess). From my point of view, it would be nice to have an opportunity to do with your messages anything you wish (to save them together or separately, or even not saving them at all). This would be a real freedom. And I like it. :) But since, I'm not a Coccinella developer, I cannot decide such things. I can only tell about my wishes.

  So, summarizing everything said above, I can see the following solution:
 - to fix a bug about "dead" chat windows with off-line contacts (I consider it as a bug, since its behaviour depends on whether a chat window had been active at the time that contact left the network or not);
 - to make sending a chat message to off-line contact using a context menu;
 - to store (maybe also optionally) a "normal" messages history somewhere not very far :) .

What do you think about it?

  Regards,
  Vladimir.