Bug 39048

Summary:	MicrosoftOnline contacts always appear as offline
Product:	Telepathy	Reporter:	B Mayes <bdmayes>
Component:	butterfly	Assignee:	Telepathy bugs list <telepathy-bugs>
Status:	RESOLVED MOVED	QA Contact:	Telepathy bugs list <telepathy-bugs>
Severity:	normal
Priority:	medium
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	Other
OS:	Linux (All)
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:

Description B Mayes 2011-07-07 14:07:49 UTC

I initially filed this on Gnome's Bugzilla against Empathy but they closed it saying it sounded like telepathy-butterfly issues.  I am running Ubuntu 11.04 and it appears that the package version is 0.5.15-1.  I didn't see that version above so I left it as unspecified for now.

The problem is that my company recently switched to using the Microsoft Online services for email (in other words, our email is now in the cloud).  Previously everyone just created a Hotmail address and used that as their chat ID.  Recently however people have been logging into chat using their work email address, which Microsoft apparently allows for logins to Live Messenger.

It doesn't seem to matter if they login with Live Messenger or they login using Trillian -- whenever any of these users are added to my contact list they show up as permanently offline.  I can still send and receive messages to them, but since their status is always offline I can never be certain whether they are online or truly offline.

As a side note, I cannot seem to use Empathy to login using my work email address at all.  It just never seems to connect even though I am choosing the "Windows Live (MSN)" account.  I guess the "Microsoft Online" services probably use a different server than traditional MSN accounts?  I am the only Linux user at my company but I don't know of anyone else that has any problems using Windows Live Messenger or Trillian.

Comment 1 B Mayes 2011-10-07 09:36:27 UTC

I wanted to update this bug, as I am no longer certain that there is even a bug here. I have figured out how to view these contacts as online, but I'm not sure why I had to perform the additional steps. It could be an issue with telepathy-butterfly not properly setting some flag when sending data to the server? Maybe it's an issue with Microsoft's service? I don't know, but here is what I did to fix the issue:

- Login to hotmail.com with my user id
- Click on Messenger > Contacts to view a full list of contacts
- Select the contact that appeared offline

At this point, if you are friends with the person and sharing status information it should say "You are friends with John Smith". However, it seemed that for some contacts it would say something to the effect of "You appear as invisible to John Smith. Click here to change the information you share with this person."

Once you click that and change the settings to be friends and share your status, then everything should show up properly in Empathy/Pidgin/etc. I did encounter a few cases where things still were not fixed. When this happened I simply deleted the person from my contact list, had them delete me from their contact list, and then sent another invite and started the process all over. If that didn't work then have both sides delete the contact again and make the other person invite you. Eventually after several attempts I got back to the "invisible" message in Hotmail and changing the settings to share my status finally resolved the problem.

It may take a few tries but the above steps should eventually get everything working. I no longer have any issues with any of the MSN contacts in my list.

Since this issue doesn't seem to occur for Trillian/Live Messenger users I suspect it is an issue with some flag not being properly sent when telepathy communicates with the MSN servers. But if I am wrong and there is no defect in telepathy-butterfly please feel free to close this one out. I at least have a workaround whenever issues arise.

Comment 2 GitLab Migration User 2019-12-03 19:47:55 UTC

-- GitLab Migration Automatic Message --

This bug has been migrated to freedesktop.org's GitLab instance and has been closed from further activity.

You can subscribe and participate further through the new bug through this link to our GitLab instance: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/telepathy/telepathy-butterfly/issues/64.

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