Friday, April 11, 2008

Using Messenger accounts with non-Microsoft SMTP Domains in LCS/OCS With PIC

I'm not sure if the subject on this post even makes sense, but it's the best I could come up with. Essentially the issue is that even though you have LCS or OCS set up with Public IM Connectivity (PIC) you can't add contacts that use MSN/Live Messenger unless they have a Microsoft SMTP domain for their account. The valid MS domains (as of the latest update on the KB article) are:

  • hotmail.co.jp
  • hotmail.co.th
  • hotmail.co.uk
  • hotmail.com
  • hotmail.com.ar
  • hotmail.com.tr
  • hotmail.de
  • hotmail.it
  • hotmail.fr
  • messengeruser.com
  • msn.com
  • simpatico.ca
  • passport.com
  • passporthotmail.com
  • webtv.com

I think it's safe to assume the live.com domain and all the country specific variations of it are on that list as well, but I haven't tested those.

But, you can set up a Messenger account with any SMTP domain you want. If you add them in to the LCS/OCS client, they simply don't work. I may be an idiot, but for the longest time I thought that's just the way it was. Then today I stumbled across a KB article that describes how to do it. It's a matter of manipulating the IM address of the contact you want to add. It's not very obvious, and it would be nice to see the OCS client/server catch these and fix them for you, or at least tell you the proper format.

So I know user@gmail.com is a Messenger user, and I want to add them to my OCS client, the address should be entered in the following format:

user(gmail.com)@msn.com

Odd, but hey it works. Check out the full KB article here.

No comments: