[ot] MSN Messenger: if you need it there is still hope

[Lorenzo Prince]

Hi.
Just thought everyone would like to know.  If you use centericq for 
instant messaging and you have a lot of friends you can't convince to 
give up the ubiquitous MSN instant messenger, you may have noticed that 
the author of Centericq has thus far decided to avoid potential legal 
trouble by not providing support for the new MSN protocol.  This of 
course causes problems for those of us who unfortunately need to connect 
to this service, that is until now.  I have found the solution to this 
problem, and it works great for me, though it is a little involved.  I 
will explain.

If anyone is familiar with Jabber, you probably know that some servers 
run gateways to verious instant messaging protocols.  Fortunately for 
us, the gateways that connect to MSN STILL WORK.  At least one that I 
found at JID msn.gate.amessage.de works.  The involved part comes in 
now, because Centericq doesn't allow for registration of gateways (also 
called transports.)  The good news is that there is a command-line 
Jabber client out there called imcom.  If you don't want to look for it, 
I have it at

ftp://prince.homelinux.org/software/imcom-1.32.tar.gz

Just setup a Jabber account either through Centericq or through Imcom.  
Then in Imcom, log into your account and type

/agenthelp msn.gate.amessage.info

and simply follow the prompts.  Then type
/quit

when you get the IMCOM> prompt and restart Centericq.  You will then get 
a lot of authorization requests from your MSN contacts.  Just accept all 
the authorizations by pressing "a" on each one.  You are now back on 
MSN.

I do hope this helped those of you who needed it, as I asked the 
question about this earlier and no one including me knew at the time 
that this would work.

P.S.  This will work no matter which Jabber server you have your account 
on.

Prince