Offline, finally...
It's probably been the biggest annoyance with Google's Jabber implementation, the lack of offline messages. I only use my Gmail-based accounts occasionally, but I do send messages to a lot of Gmail-based or hosted Jabber addresses via my own server, so hopefully it really does work; at least I tried one message to a friend just now telling her about my Christmas plans and it seemed to not complain anymore about 503, service not available, or something like that.
On a note, it appears from what I can tell that offline isn't available yet for sending messages via the Gmail webmail interface. Hopefully soon.
That is good. If it weren't for my worries about how I'd transfer my Jabber roster over to them and keep subscription information, I'd probably be using hosted Gmail for my e-mail and Jabber service already. It's fun running my own server, but does require quite a bit of work to keep it sane. Worst case, if I can't be bothered running my own server anymore, it should be quite an easy effort to move the roster semi-manually. Just re-requesting subscriptions will be annoying. Sigh.