Messages lost when too long

Binary package hint: gaim

The current behaiour of GAIM when messages are too long for single messages on the chosen protocol should be changed as it loses user's data. The current behaviour is that if a user writes a long message (the longer it is the harder it is to reproduce accurately) and presses enter then the entire written text disappears and the conversation window gets a little red message saying "Unable to send message: The message is too large." All of the text written into the message box is gone, did not get sent so does not appear in the message window and is not available to the recipient and the log does not show the text of the message either.

Steps to reproduce:
1) Enter a chat with somebody (in my case using the MSN protocol)
2) Write a very long message. The longer the better, the more content the better
3) Press enter. The whole thing is now gone.

I have used Kopete briefly and the way it handles this is to split the message into smaller parts which are sent one after the other. Another way would be to display the message as part of the error (as in 'Unable to send message: The message is too large. <message contents>') and another would be to keep the message text in the input box so the user can copy it to another location like Gedit then split it up manually. In each of these ways the text of the message is not lost (as you can tell I just had a nasty experience with this bug after being used to Kopete's behaviour and have lost a message I spent 3 hours writing)