wiki:Protocol Specific Questions

Context Navigation

Version 25 (modified by John Bailey, 16 years ago) (diff)
fix this

Protocol Specific Questions

AIM (OSCAR) Protocol

Can I set my profile?

Yes, you can. Go to Accounts->account name->Set User Info.

I just changed my buddy icon and I can't see the new one!

First, try IMing yourself a few times. Buddy icons are checked when you IM people, so that may work. If it still doesn't update, check the file size (buddy icons must be smaller than 4kb) and the image size (it should be 48x48 or 50x50 in most cases). Also, check the file type. GIF or JPEG images are best supported. If all of that checks out and it still doesn't work, try restarting Pidgin.

Why are some of my buddies are not showing up as online?

AOL has set a limit for the maximum number of people you can have in your buddy list. This number is currently 500. If you don't think you are anywhere near that limit, it is possible that your server-stored buddy list is corrupt. If you think this might be the case, you can try signing on with an official AIM program from AOL. This will usually correct any problems with the list.

Can I use AIM URI's such as "aim:goim?screenname=seanegn"?

Yes; you need to register purple-url-handler in your browser. This requires that Pidgin be built with dbus support, otherwise purple-url-handler will not be installed.

Does Pidgin support DirectIM and IM Image?

Yes, absolutely. Keep in mind that you must establish a DirectIM session before you're able to insert a picture into the conversation.

Can I send SMS messages?

Yep, just send an IM to the person's phone number. For example, if the phone number is (919) 555-1234, you would message +19195551234 We think this should work for countries with a country code of 1 (the United States and Canada).

Can I add SMS numbers to my buddy list?

Yes. You should be able to add phone numbers to your buddy list using the same format as explained in the previous question.

ICQ (OSCAR) Protocol

Important note about ICQ FAQs

The entire AIM section applies to ICQ as well. Information in this section is in addition to the AIM section above.

Can I send SMS messages?

Yes, starting with pidgin version 2.2.0, you can send SMS via ICQ. This works only with carriers which ICQ supports. For example, if you want to send SMS to a phone number 052-3999999 in Israel, open a new conversation window in ICQ and enter the following: +972523999999 or (+<country code><area code without 0><phone number>).

Why do my buddies' messages display incorrectly?

ICQ has no comprehension of character sets or encodings. It simply sends (almost) any random chunk of data a user enters. Pidgin by default assumes everything is UTF-8. If this is not the case, you will need to edit your account (Accounts->your ICQ account->Edit Account) and change the Encoding setting on the Advanced tab. You will need to enter the correct encoding for your buddies' messages there. At this time it is currently possible to configure only one encoding for an ICQ account.

IRC Protocol

How do I join a channel?

Create an IRC account and then sign on. After you have signed on, you can use Buddies->Join A Chat on the buddy list to join a channel. In any window, either a conversation or a chat, in which your IRC user is the sender, you can also use /join to connect to a new channel.

Is there a way to make Pidgin automatically identify me on login?

Add NickServ to your buddy list and place buddy pounces on him/her/it. Do not include "/msg nickserv" as part of the message to send. If your IRC network uses a different services bot to authenticate, add that bot to your list and pounce it instead.

Alternatively, you could try the irchelper plugin from the Purple Plugin Pack.

Can I automatically join channels on login?

On the buddy list, select Buddies->Add Chat. Use this dialog to add the chat to your buddy list. Once the chat appears in your list, right-click on it and select Auto-Join. The channel will auto-join whenever you sign onto your IRC account.

Is it possible to change the user name that appears in username@hostname?

Go to the Accounts menu. Select your IRC account and click Edit Account. Click the Advanced tab. Enter a name in the Username field.

How can I set/change my real name?

Go to the Accounts menu. Select your IRC account and click Edit Account. Click the Advanced tab. Enter a name in the Real Name field.

Why does text display incorrectly in channels?

IRC has no comprehension of character sets or encodings. It simply sends (almost) any random chunk of data a user enters. Pidgin by default assumes everything is UTF-8. If this is not the case, you will need to edit your account (Accounts->your IRC account->Edit Account) and change the Encoding setting on the Advanced tab. You will need to enter the correct encoding for your channels there. You can specify multiple encodings in a comma-delimited list, such as UTF-8,ISO-8859-15, to cause Pidgin to attempt multiple encodings. In this case, each encoding is tried in succession until a successful decode happens or all encodings listed are exhausted.

XMPP (Jabber) Protocol

How do I choose which XMPP server to use or configure an XMPP account?

The XMPP server is part of your XMPP ID. For example, the ID foo@bar.com, bar.com would be the server to use. When entering your XMPP account information into Pidgin, specify everything before the @ in the Screen name field and everything after the @ in the Domain field.

What is the "Resource" field for in the account editor?

The resource field specifies the XMPP resource you are using. The use of unique resources allows you to connect to your XMPP server from multiple locations simultaneously. Resources might have meaningful names, such as Home, Work, Mobile, etc., or something else entirely that you choose. Pidgin defaults to a resource of Home.

How do I change my resource string?

Go to Accounts->Add/Edit?. Find your XMPP account and uncheck the Enabled box. Select the account and click Modify. Change the string in the Resource field.

How can I configure resource priority?

Pidgin (more specifically, libpurple) does not currently support user-configurable priorities. We have a non-configurable priority list that is used:

Status Name Priority
Available 1
Chatty 1
Away 0
Do Not Disturb 0
Extended Away 0

What does "Cancel Presence Notification" do?

See the next question.

How can I deauthorize a buddy from seeing my status?

Right-click the buddy on the buddy list and select Cancel Presence Notification. Note that the buddy will have to request authorization again to be able to see your presence.

What does "Unsubscribe" do?

If you select "Unsubscribe" from the menu presented when right-clicking an XMPP buddy, you will no longer see that buddy's presence. You will need to re-request authorization to resume seeing the buddy's presence.

How do I remove a buddy from my roster?

Right-click the buddy and click Remove.

How do I create a conference?

There are two methods:

Join the conference
1. Select "Join a Chat" from the buddy list's "Buddies" menu.
2. Select your XMPP account.
3. Fill in the fields you see.
  - "Room" should be the short name of the conference. For example, "myconference"
  - "Server" is the server on which the conference will be created. It must be a MUC server, such as conference.jabber.org. The chat's ID will be Room@server, so the example "myconference" would have the id "myconference@….
  - "Handle" is the name you wish to be displayed in the chat. It is similar in concept to a nickname on IRC.
  - "Password" is optional for creating a new room. You probably don't want to fill this field in.
4. Click "Join."
5. You will see a dialog asking you about creating the new room. You can either accept the default configuration or configure the room, at your option.
Add the conference to your roster (buddy list)
1. Select "Add Chat" from the buddy list's "Buddies" menu.
2. Select your XMPP account.
3. Fill in the fields you see.
  - "Room" should be the short name of the conference. For example, "myconference"
  - "Server" is the server on which the conference will be created. It must be a MUC server, such as conference.jabber.org. The chat's ID will be Room@server, so the example "myconference" would have the id "myconference@….
  - "Handle" is the name you wish to be displayed in the chat. It is similar in concept to a nickname on IRC.
  - "Password" is optional for creating a new room. You probably don't want to fill this field in.
  - "Alias" is the alias you wish to assign to the chat. By assigning an alias, you can display a useful description in the buddy list instead of the chat's name.
  - "Group" is the group in your buddy list in which you wish the chat to appear.
4. Click "Add."
5. Find the chat in your buddy list and double-click it.
6. You will see a dialog asking you about creating the new room. You can either accept the default configuration or configure the room, at your option.

How do I invite a buddy to a conference?

Select "Invite" from the chat's "Conversation" menu. Note that you can only invite people to a conversation that is already a chat--you can't "promote" a one-on-one conversation to a chat.

Yahoo!(Y!M) Protocol

How do I get blocking someone to work?

There is a known bug in the Yahoo! protocol code present in libpurple. We've been unable to determine the exact cause or a workable code solution to the problem, but the failure seems to be most prominent when the blocking code tries to automatically remove the buddy from your list (this is required for a block on Yahoo!). It will also always fail if libpurple thinks the buddy is already blocked.

We suggest manually removing Yahoo! buddies before attempting to block them. For buddies reported as already blocked who are not in fact blocked, unblock them (in Tools->Privacy) and block them again. This works often.

Why can't I connect to Yahoo! from behind a firewall or NAT?

Your firewall or NAT is not allowing YMSG packets (packets for the Yahoo! protocol) to pass through it. You can try changing the port Pidgin attempts to connect to. Go to Tools->Edit, find your Yahoo! account, uncheck the Enabled box, then select the account and click Modify. On the Advanced tab, change the value in the Pager port field. Ports known to work are 20, 23, 25, 80, 119, 5050, 8001, and 8002. This will not work for all users, but does help many.

Why doesn't Pidgin have the official client's "Firewall with no proxy" option?

The official client's Firewall with no proxy option wraps the Yahoo! YMSG protocol in HTTP, which enables it to pass through many firewalls and NATs that filter IM traffic but not HTTP traffic. Pidgin and libpurple currently do not support this.

Can I get a list of Yahoo! chatrooms? What about localized lists?

Tools->Room List will let you list available Yahoo! chat rooms. Yahoo! has currently disabled user-created rooms. The option to create rooms still exists in Pidgin but will be non-functional until Yahoo! re-enables user-created rooms.

By default the room list shows US-localized chat rooms. To get a localized room list for another locale, you'll need to change the Chat Room Locale setting in the account editor, on the Advanced tab. Enter a country code in this field. Certain country codes no longer seem to work (most notably de). The list of known-working country codes was at last check the following:

aa -> Asia
ar -> Argentina
au -> Australia
br -> Brazil
ca -> Canada
cf -> Central African Republic
cn -> China
dk -> Denmark
es -> Spain
fr -> France
hk -> Hong Kong
in -> India
it -> Italy
kr -> Korea, Republic of
mx -> Mexico
no -> Norway
se -> Sweden
sg -> Singapore
tw -> Taiwan
uk -> United Kingdom
us -> United States of America

If you discover any of these no longer work, or find other country codes that do work, please don't hesitate to contact the development team.

What protocol does Pidgin use to connect to Yahoo!?

Normally Pidgin uses the YMSG protocol, which is the same protocol that the official Yahoo! clients use, although Pidgin uses a slightly older version of the protocol than current official clients. If an attempt to login returns the "Invalid Password" error code, Pidgin automatically tries to log in using the "WebMessenger" method. This method still uses the YMSG protocol, but authenticates differently, and connects to a different server.

While in Web Messenger mode, several things work differently or not at all. Adding, moving, and removing buddies doesn't work, and the only available statuses are "Available" and "Invisible". In addition, the Yahoo! server seems to ignore all Yahoo! Chat related packets. For this reason, we use the YCHT protocol to join Yahoo! Chat rooms while connected using the Web Messenger method.

MSN Protocol

Why are file transfers so slow?

MSN file transfer support is limited to the proxied version of file transfer support in the protocol. This means that the files are sent to MSN's servers, then the server sends the data to the other user. We don't know if or when we will ever support any of the peer-to-peer file transfer methods available in the MSN protocol.

Is there a way to invite more than one person to a chat?

Yes, but this is a case where our design differs from the official clients. In the MSN world, there is no distinction between an IM session and a chat. Within libpurple and Pidgin, however, there is. If you start an IM with one user, then you cannot invite someone else to the conversation. If, however, you right-click the buddy and select Initiate Chat, then you can invite as many people to the chat as you want using Conversation->Invite. Unfortunately, Pidgin does not yet provide a convenient way to select multiple buddies at once to invite.

Why can't I set a status message on MSN?

Pidgin uses an outdated version of the MSN protocol that does not support status messages. For this reason, until our MSN protocol support is updated, status messages will not be supported.

What version of the protocol does Pidgin use?

Pidgin uses MSNP9.

Is MSNP11 (MSN7) or MSNP14 (WLM) going to be supported?

MSNP14 support is slated for inclusion soon. The code currently exists, but is not yet release-ready.

Why can't I log into MSN?

You probably did not compile Pidgin with SSL support, or the SSL plugin failed to load. The MSN protocol requires the use of SSL, which Pidgin provides by either GnuTLS or the combination of NSS and NSPR from the Mozilla project. See these notes to get SSL up and running.

Why isn't MSN in the list of protocols?

If you're running Gentoo, rebuild with the "msn" USE flag enabled. For some reason, it was deemed necessary to make the MSN protocol an off-by-default USE flag. If you don't like this behavior, complain to the Gentoo maintainers.

For other distributions, it is probably that the MSN protocol plugin didn't load. See the next question.

The MSN plugin won't load, but I have Mozilla NSS or GNUTLS or both!

See these notes on getting SSL up and running.

What does "MSN: S: 911 3" in the debug window mean when I can't connect?

Unhandled command '911' indicates some form of authentication error. This could be simply that your password is wrong.

Other reports of this error seem to indicate that it could be a timeout problem--if the authenticaion process takes too long to complete, the authentication fails. Slowness could be caused by a number of factors, including:

being on dialup
slow DNS resolution
network problems.

Please check that your configured DNS servers are correct, and are resolving hostnames reasonably quickly. On Linux these are specified in /etc/resolv.conf - At least 5 people resolved the '911' error by removing incorrect DNS servers from here.

If you are still having problems please try these tests to try to identify any potential network problems: using telnet, try connecting to

port 1863 on messenger.hotmail.com
port 443 on loginnet.passport.com
port 443 on login.passport.com

If any of those fail, or take a long time to connect, then this is probably not a bug in Pidgin.

How do I set an avatar?

We call these buddy icons. You can use the global icon selector on the buddy list or use the account editor, both of which are described here.

What does "Has You" in the buddy list tooltip mean?

It shows you if that MSN user has added you to his/her buddy list. "Has you: No" does not mean you can't talk to that person.

How do I set my MSN Friendly Name (the name other users see)?

In the Buddy List window, go to Accounts-> your MSN account->Set Friendly Name.

Can I set my friendly name with a plugin?

No. This leads to far too much abuse of the already-abused friendly name. Stuffing such useless information as the currently playing song on your music player or a status message inside the friendly name completely defeats the purpose of the friendly name, which is to provide a more easily recognizable name than an e-mail address.

Can I turn off displaying nicknames/friendly names?

No. If your buddies are using friendly names that make it difficult to distinguish them from each other, use aliases to set useful differentiating names for the buddies.

What does "Error reading from switchboard server" mean?

We haven't fully figured that out yet, but even Microsoft's client seems to get similar errors, although with less frequency than we do.

Gadu-Gadu (GG) Protocol

What is Gadu-Gadu?

Gadu-Gadu is an IM protocol popular in Poland. You can find more about it at www.gadu-gadu.pl (website in Polish).

I compiled Pidgin from source. Why doesn't it have Gadu-Gadu support?

We now use an external libgadu. Install your distro's libgadu-dev or libgadu-devel package and rebuild Pidgin (making sure to rerun ./configure). If your distro doesn't provide libgadu, you can download it from here. Unpack the tarball and run:

~/libgadu-1.7.0$ ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --disable-libgadu-openssl \
> --disable-static --enable-shared
~/libgadu-1.7.0$ make
~/libgadu-1.7.0$ su -c "make install"

Zephyr Protocol

What is Zephyr?

Zephyr is an IM protocol developed at MIT for use with Project Athena. Its features include Kerberos IV authentication and multi-level chats (aka "subscriptions"). You're probably using this because your college/employer/organization uses it as a local IM/chat system. If not, you probably don't have a server to connect to.

Other Zephyr clients (zwgc, owl, tzc) work, but Pidgin dies with "Couldn't initialize zephyr"

Your site might require the use of Kerberos 4 for authentication, though few prepackaged Pidgin binaries use Kerberos. One solution is to compile Pidgin with the --with-krb4 flag to point to the location of your Kerberos 4 devel files, usually one of /usr, /usr/local, or /usr/athena, e.g.

~/pidgin$ ./configure --with-krb4=/path/to/kerberosIV

Pidgin isn't working, but I never got any other Zephyr client working

You need to have zhm (which comes with the standard Zephyr distribution) installed, and running, and pointed at your Zephyr servers. e.g.

zhm z1.example.com z2.example.com z3.example.com

Alternatively, there might be a firewall or a NAT between you and the Zephyr servers. Zephyr generally doesn't work in an environment where incoming connections cannot be made to arbitrary UDP ports.

How do I avoid compiling Pidgin with Kerberos 4 support?

See the next question; the same trick for firewall traversal applies to avoiding building with Kerberos support.

How do I use Zephyr from behind my firewall?

You can use tzc ("Trivial Zephyr Client") and ssh to run Zephyr from a machine that is behind a firewall or NAT. First, make sure that tzc is installed and working on the remote machine. The best version of tzc to use can be found here.

Make sure that you can make a passwordless ssh connection to the remote machine and get kerberos 4 tickets. Then, click the Advanced tab in the account editor, enable "Use tzc", and set the tzc command to

/path/to/ssh username@hostname /path/to/tzc -e "%s"

Alternately, if you have tzc working on your machine, you can enable "Use tzc", and set the tzc command to

/path/to/tzc -e "%s"

SILC Protocol

What is SILC?

SILC is an open protocol designed from the ground up with security in mind. It is, or should be, the protocol of choice for the paranoid. See http://www.silcnet.org for more details.

Novell Groupwise Messenger Protocol

Novell GroupWise Messenger is a component of Novell GroupWise see http://www.novell.com/products/groupwise

Are there any public servers?

Not really. This protocol is designed to connect to a Novell GroupWise Messenger server running on a corporate LAN. No one that we're aware of runs a public server.

I can't seem to get it to work.

Novell tells us that this protocol plugin will only work with either the GroupWise Messenger for Linux server or the GroupWise Messenger SP2 (or higher) server for NetWare and Windows. In addition, the server must be secure (SSL enabled). If you have any trouble, see the FAQ question about submitting bugs, and they will be forwarded to Novell, who have been kind enough to continue active maintenance of the protocol plugin code they provided us.

Lotus Sametime Protocol

Are there any public servers?

Apart from a demonstration server hosted by Lotus, no. This protocol is designed to connect to a Lotus Sametime server running on a corporate LAN.

Why doesn't Sametime appear in the protocols list?

Sametime support in Pidgin depends on a separate library called Meanwhile. You will need to install both the Meanwhile library and the libpurple-meanwhile package to enable Sametime support. If you are building Pidgin from source, then libpurple-meanwhile will be built automatically if you have the development headers for Meanwhile installed.

Why do I get the error "Not Authorized" when connecting?

The Sametime server to which you're attempting to connect has been configured with a white-list of acceptable clients. This error indicates that the client ID used by Pidgin (0x1700) is apparently not in that white-list, so the server is not permitting you to log in. You can cause Pidgin to masquerade as the default Sametime Connect client by setting the "Hide client identity" option in your account preferences.

Myspace IM Protocol

Why do I see "Protocol error, code 260" when my password is correct?

There are two common issues that cause this error:

You may be using your "friendly name" (also sometimes called "IM name") instead of your e-mail address to log in. Make sure you are using your e-mail address for "Screen Name" when setting up the account.
Myspace IM restricts password lengths to a 10 character maximum, so make sure your password is not too long. You can change your Myspace password at myspace.com.

Download in other formats:

Plain Text

Status Name	Priority
Available	1
Chatty	1
Away	0
Do Not Disturb	0
Extended Away	0