Apple resolves MSN connectivity problems in 10.5.3 update
Those of you who’ve used MSN via Adium on Leopard may have observed Adium taking a very long time to connect, or not connecting at all. A lot of you sent us bug reports about this.
The problem wasn’t a bug in Adium, or even in Libpurple. In Mac OS X 10.5.0, Apple changed the way it looks up hostnames, such as the one for the MSN server. They changed it to use a “SRV” request instead of an “A” request.
Unfortunately, some ISPs’ domain-name servers only knew how to handle “A” requests, and would ignore the “SRV” requests. That’s what was causing the problem: broken domain-name servers.
In Mac OS X 10.5.3, Apple changed its lookup method back to the earlier behavior. So, for those of you who had this problem, MSN should now connect again, without workarounds such as using OpenDNS.
June 5th, 2008 at 15:44
Thanks. I used OpenDNS and found it’s behaviour with the Browser rather annoying.
June 5th, 2008 at 19:33
Huh, I was never aware of this.
June 6th, 2008 at 11:13
This is a bit slightly untrue. I still cannot connect to MSN through Adium (and yes, it’s a libpurple problem) behind a proxy. And yes, MSN does connect without any kind of problem…
Please, ask the libpurple guys to fix this issue. There are several opened items in its bugtrack, as well as on Adium’s about this problem.
Nevertheless, keep up the good work though!
June 6th, 2008 at 13:33
What would be the rationale for swithcing to the SRV method in the first place?
June 6th, 2008 at 15:34
@Rui: Problems with proxies are unrelated to the problem Peter describes in this post. This is an issue with DNS resolution.
June 24th, 2008 at 20:13
[...] Adium Beta - We do it right so they don’t have to. Also, this might be a good read if it applies to you: Adium - Blog [...]
June 26th, 2008 at 00:12
i keep getting this:
Message may have not been sent because a timeout occurred:
very annoying!!@@#
July 3rd, 2008 at 16:21
i cant connect to MSN since 5 days through adium. or any other mac messenger, and i cant even visit http://www.hotmail.com or live.msn.com through safari or firefox. is there a way to fix this ?
thanks
July 7th, 2008 at 19:26
Installing 1.2.7 fixed the issue for me. I’m on 10.5.4 and was unable to connect to MSN using Adium 1.3b7. Removed 1.3b7 and installing 1.2.7 fixed the connectivity issue.
July 14th, 2008 at 01:09
same here, was able connect to MSN using 1.2.7, but not the beta version
August 6th, 2008 at 12:17
I’m on Leopard 10.5.4 using Adium 1.2.7 and still unable to connect. Did Apple switch back to SRV for 10.5.4 after flipping back to A when moving form 10.5.2 to 10.5.3?
August 26th, 2008 at 17:41
I got today’s update and since then, it tells me that my e-mail or password is invalid. Can’t be. What happened? Help.
August 30th, 2008 at 03:26
I get the same thing as Aviva, I can’t connect and it says that my email or password is incorrect, but the same email and password log me into Hotmail. I’m using OS X 10.5.4 and Adium 1.3.
September 11th, 2008 at 07:53
I set my MSN account to connect via HTTP and it worked.
September 17th, 2008 at 16:45
Okay, I’m getting the same error, on OS X 10.4.11 using Adium. I’ve not been able to connect to MSN in over a month, using OS X 10.5 or 10.4, but I can sign into Hotmail just fine, so I know my user name and password are the correct ones. (they’re the same ones I used for my MSN account). I’ve also tried telling Adium to connect to MSN via HTTP, and it had no effect.
I still get the same error stating that either my user name, or password are incorrect.
Also, under both 10.4, and 10.5, I can connect to MSN just fine using Finch (Pidgin sans GUI). So it’s not a libpurple issue, (as Adium, Finch, and Pidgin all use libpurple, if it was that it would effect all of them, and it doesn’t).
Does anyone have any updates to this? It seems like it’s been a long time since anyone has replied with any actual information on possible fixes to the issue? I’m hoping that the people that make Adium are still working on this issue.
September 17th, 2008 at 16:50
I retract that last post, I had to restart Adium, not just reconnect the client, it now connects to MSN after setting it to connect via HTTP.
September 20th, 2008 at 08:47
Hi all …
i want somebody to help me how to u the adium because i don’t have no idea about how it use thank u please replay on this web or on my email …
September 23rd, 2008 at 15:04
I’m gettin this problem with Adium 1.3.1 in Tiger. All my MSN contacts disappeared when it finally connected. I started re-adding them manually but then MSN disconnected again. Is this the same problem…and will it be fixed?
September 27th, 2008 at 10:27
My bad, I hadn’t read the earlier posts from Xoa. It’s fine now that I’ve set it to connect via HTTP, but why was there a problem in the first place?
I’m just curious :/