MicrosoftOnline contacts always appear as offline
Submitted by B Mayes
Assigned to Telepathy bugs list
Description
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.