IRCX

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IRCX (Internet Relay Chat eXtensions) is an extension to the Internet Relay Chat protocol, developed by Microsoft.^[1]

IRCX defines ways to use Simple Authentication and Security Layer authentication to authenticate securely to the server, channel properties/metadata, multilingual support that can be queried using the enhanced "LISTX" command (to find a channel in your language), an additional user level (so there are three levels: owners, hosts, and voices), specific IRC operator levels, and full support for UTF-8 (in nicknames, channel names, and so on). IRCX is fully backwards compatible with IRC; the new features are downgraded to something a standard IRC client can see (and UTF-8 nicknames are converted to hexadecimal).^[1]

IRCX was originally supported on Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5 (in place of the old Microsoft Chat protocol, which is a binary protocol) and a module was available for Microsoft Exchange 2000.^[2]

Microsoft started to put IRCX through a standardisation process with the Internet Engineering Task Force by publishing 4 Internet Drafts of their protocol.^[1]