I'm currently working on an IRC-Chat and we want to add the option to chat with other people privately (User-To-User) which works fine, but the messages aren't stored, meaning that a user loses all private messages after disconnecting. They also can't message a person once they have disconnected.All of this isn't the case with channels, where messages are stored for X time, allowing a asynchronous communication.
Is there a way of allowing asynchronous messaging for private User-To-User messages without storing the messages in an extra system? Or is this simply a limitation of IRC?
IRC isn't designed to store messages - it's a feature, not a bug. One way to get around this is to configure the server to 'simulate' past messages (essentially pretending to be the other user to send past messages). To do this, you would need to store messages - however, it would be on the server itself, not on a separate database or a third party.