[Bug 39048] MicrosoftOnline contacts always appear as offline

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39048

--- Comment #1 from B Mayes <bdmayes at gmail.com> 2011-10-07 09:36:27 PDT ---
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.

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