Updates on XMPP support in MSN

Good news for MSN users!

As explained in a previous post, Microsoft added XMPP support to connect MSN. A few days ago, they made it officially supported (previously was a developer preview only).

Thanks to the advice of a Microsoft developer, I even fixed the legal issue that prevented us to enable this by default. Client applications (as opposed to web applications) are not meant to ship the app secret key, even for closed source app (would be too easy to find the key in the binary). So there is a simple checkbox in the app settings to tell it is a “mobile application” and then it won’t need the secret key to authenticate.

All patches got merged and released into empathy (>=3.3.2), telepathy-gabble (>= 0.15.0), and gnome-online-accounts(>=3.3.0).

8 thoughts on “Updates on XMPP support in MSN”

  1. Happy day. For a very long time, it seemed MSN support would be subpar and difficult to maintain long-term. 😀 I’m glad they’ve stepped up and made it easier for us (and them) to develop solutions related to their service.

  2. Great news! Thanks a lot for your work! I have one question though: Does this include video chat support?

  3. No, the only things supported, as said in MS doc are:

    RFC6120: XMPP: Core
    RFC6121: XMPP: Instant Messaging and Presence. Roster management is not supported.
    XEP-0054: vcard-temp. The Messenger XMPP service supports fetching vCards, but doesn’t support updating vCards.
    XEP-0085: Chat State Notifications
    XEP-0203: Delayed Delivery

    It is similar to facebook chat.

  4. Hi,

    I wanted to try this out in Fedora (16). I compiled Empathy 3.3.3 (installed in /usr), telepathy-gabble 0.15, libfolks 0.6.6, telepathy-glib 0.17.4, gnome-online-accounts 3.3.0 (/usr), but it doesn’t work.

    In goa I can add the Windows Live account, but it does not show up in the list of accounts in empathy (yes, I relogged in gnome, so everything was restarted).

    When I try this with my google account it appears instantly in empathy, but I can’t login. (This was already with fedora stock versions).

    Any help you can give me?

  5. Also I’m worried that when I delete the old accounts (the one manually added to empathy) when this is stable, that my old logs won’t be visible anymore. (I can’t couple contacts from account X to the same contact from accounts Y).
    Well maybe I can, but this is hard work for many contacts (many is >= 3 :p), so should be done automatically.
    Will this be available in the future (or is this already available?)

  6. @Nathan Samson: Indeed, I’m not sure it will be possible to port logs. I did not though about this yet. tbh I don’t have any MSN logs myself since all my friends moved to facebook chat years ago…

  7. @Nathan Samson: You should be able to pick packages from rawhide. I never used fedora, but I’ve heard that disabling selinux fix all problems… Accounts appear in empathy using a mission-control-5 plugin installed by empathy, maybe you did not build empathy with goa support?

  8. Ok, installing some packages from rawhide and compiling folks and empathy myself (They wanted to pull in hundreds of dependencies, like PHP/ruby and other stuff I didn’t want to update)

    Now it somewhat works (Although I had some trouble activating the XMMP/Live account in empathy – It didn’t work witth the account I added yesterday, it showed up but was “offline” and no way I could make it online. Removing it from GOA and readding worked;..).
    Also note that the edit screen in empathy accounts I could configure things like server and TLS and so on. This seems to be disappeared and replaced with a “Change account from GOA” though after a close/open of that window.

    But I can’t edit my personal info, so my name appears to be “a6f7…d57@messenger.live.com”, editting the info in empathy is possible, but my edits are undone when closing the window.

    So in some sense it is better than using butterfly (people can send messages to me, with butterfly that was unstable more often than not the last weeks), but is unstable on my side (UI that is not yet completely ok and depends on the order you have done things, UI that does not work, …) but that is the price I have to pay for unstable software I guess!

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