MSN, ICQ, Jabber and multiple clients
Since yesterday, I’ve been trying to use MSN, ICQ, Yahoo, and so on with multiple clients at the same time. The idea is to stay logged in with a computer and a mobile phone at the same time. At first I thought about some kind of “bouncer” – but there aren’t any for messengers. After reading different articles, I finally tried two solutions: Jabber and Nimbuzz (based on the XMPP protocol).
You can use Nimbuzz for a lot of different protocols except for Jabber (even though it’s based on XMPP – funny). As I use Jabber, Nimbuzz was finally not useful for me. I could have used the Nimbuzz protocol with a Jabber client, but it didn’t support some of the protocol’s advantages. I couldn’t see avatars, had to rename every contact, etc. So I could have either used the native Nimbuzz client (which didn’t support Jabber) or a Jabber client which didn’t provide all features. So I deleted my Nimbuzz account …
Skype support was a plus though, but I can’t live without Jabber. Besides, skype was also just available with the native client.
However, I tried to use a Jabber server istead. There are a lot of so called “transporters”, which provide functionality for other IM protocols. So a Jabber server is able to communicate with MSN, ICQ and Yahoo contacts. I didn’t want to rely on a public Jabber server with this transporters, so I installed my own one. I do have a small dedicated server, which wasn’t really used, so I installed a Jabber server on it. I used:
- ejabberd
- PyICQ-t
- PyMSN-t
It was a bit tricky to make the server work with those transporters, but in the end it worked. If you need my config files, just ask. Well, now I was able to register a Jabber account on my own server and add all my ICQ and MSN contacts to it.
I’m a Adium user – so I had no chance to configure this at all. First I’ve downloaded PSI for registering the transporters for my Jabber account. But I noticed, that all the names got lost. They were displayed as “UIN@my.jabber.server.com”. I do have about 250 contacts – and I really didn’t want to rename every single one of them. So I searched for a solution and found out, that PSI can’t do this automatically. But some windows clients can, yay. So I downloaded “Gajim”, and did the same again: I’ve registered for the transporters in my Jabber account and it finally worked. It imported all of my contacts even with the correct names and aliases.
Reconnecting with Adium and everything was fine. All my Jabber, MSN and ICQ contacts within one protocol – great! I’ve instantly booted up another computer and logged in with another Jabber resource (I’ll talk about that later) and it really worked. I was using ICQ and MSN at the same time with exactly the same account.
But there’s one problem. Jabber has some resource/priority concept for being logged in with multiple clients:
Your jabber account usually looks like this:
yourname@jabber.server.com
Now if you use it at different computers, you have to specify different resources for each client:
yourname@jabber.server.com/home
and
yourname@jabber.server.com/office
Jabber now knows how to identify each client and can handle them. If someone sends a message to “yourname@jabber.server.com” both clients will (usuallt ^^) receive this messages. If you send a message at the office to XY, the reply will go to “yourname@jabber.server.com/office”. So if someone just sends you a message randomly, it’ll go to both clients. If it’s a reply to you, only one client will receive it. That’s how it’s supposed to be. At least that’s what the clients do.
Also there’s a “priority” of each client. It’s a number between -128 and 127 and will specify which client is used. Let’s say you’re at home and don’t use your mobile phone. Then you’ll set the priority of your mobile phone to 0 and the priority of your home client to e.g. 10.
If someone writes now, only your client at home will receive this message. This makes sense … in theory.
I found out, that a lot of clients can’t handle priority very well (especially the mobile phone ones). Nimbuzz e.g. always used a priority of 100. You couldn’t change it.
Anyway. I used “Slick” on my Nokia E71 as an IM client. It worked very well so far, but when I set it up for my own Jabber server, it messed everything up. Sometimes it received messages, sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes it sent messages, sometimes it didn’t. When I tried to send something from /mobile to /home, it was sent back to /mobile. And so on …
Slick is great, but I think it wasn’t designed for Jabber, transporters and multiple clients. Then I tried every single multimessenger I could find for Symbian. Each of them didn’t really work. Either they didn’t support XMPP or they didn’t allow me to change the server. And if it worked, the usability was awful. I wish I could use Slick. I’ve already sent a bug report, se we have to wait.
However, I use “Talkonaut” now. The usability isn’t as nice as Slick, but it works. After downloading, it was completely overloaded with content, but you can configure the UI the way you want it to be. I just want a contact list and chat-tabs. After some time, I even got “Talkonaut” configured to look like that. I’ve also deleted all the SIP services and conference rooms. It looks much better now, but still not as good as Slick 
Okay, so now I use Adium on 2 Macs and Talkonaut on my E71 – Simultaneously. And it works 
After experimenting with priority I figured out, it was the best to set it to maximum for all of the clients. So every client has the priority of 127. Now I’ll receive every single incoming message at every client at the same time.
It took a lot of hours to make it work – but now it’s very sweet
If someone is interested in more details, I’m going to publish my config files and exact setup.
Hey there,