connection error, reading error

[David Woolley]

Ethan Blanton wrote:

> 
> MSN is known to not work for almost all users in versions prior to
> somewhere in the 2.6 or 2.7s.  The fix for the problem you have is to
> upgrade.

As additional explanation:

Microsoft do not approve of the use of clients like Pidgin (there is a 
very small list of approved third party clients), and, I think MS would 
never approve an open source client.  Microsoft often change the MSN 
protocol in ways that make it incompatible with older clients.  They 
have not published details of the protocol for a long time.

Thus, when using a third party client with MSN, it is essential to use a 
recent version, and even then there may be times when it doesn't work 
because Microsoft has made a change which has not yet been reverse 
engineered and worked round.  (There are actually some aspects of the 
MSN protocol which have still not been fully reverse engineered and 
cause some users of Pidgin problems.)

This is not a case of bug fixes, where you can avoid the situation that 
manifests the bug, rather than updating.  It is a case of having to 
track and un-published, but moving specification.
-- 
David Woolley
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