An excerpt out of my Adium chat logs from a Thursday night chat over MSN. To set the stage: a number of jovially intoxicated barhoppers had just made their way loudly past my window…
- James: hmm…screaming hooligans outside
- Could not send; a connection error occurred.
- James: hmm…screaming hooligans outside
- Could not send; a connection error occurred.
- James: you there?
- Caitlin: yeah?
- James: not letting me send a message a couple times
- James: hmm…screaming hooligans outside
- Could not send; a connection error occurred.
- James: bah, it’s happening again…didn’t this happen before? maybe it was with someone else
- James: some random string of characters will cause a connection error
- James: screaming hooligans outside
- James: hmm…
- James: hmm… screaming hooligans outside
- James: hmm…screaming hooligans outside
- Could not send; a connection error occurred.
- Caitlin: weird
- James: only does it when I remove the space between hmm… and screaming
- Caitlin: tell them to shut up
- James: .screaming
- Could not send; a connection error occurred.
- James: .s
- James: .scre
- Could not send; a connection error occurred.
- James: .sc
- James: .scr
- Could not send; a connection error occurred.
- James: dot-s-c-r doesn’t work
- James: scr
- James: ..sc
- James: strange
- Caitlin: what’s wrong?
- James: nothing…just this string of characters being rejected by msn for whatever reason
- James: .scr
- Could not send; a connection error occurred.
- James: try sending me [period]scr
- James: like . scr without the space
- James: .sca
- James: .scb
- James: .scc
- James: .scr
- Could not send; a connection error occurred.
- James: .scd
- James: .sce
- James: .sar
- James: .bcr
- James: weird
- Caitlin: it’s gotta be your messenger
- James: did you send one to me?
- Caitlin: yup
- James: didn’t get it
- James: yeah I assume it’s my client (Editor’s note: I’m sorry I doubted you, Adium.)
- Caitlin: why were you trying to send it to me
- James: because I narrowed it down to that sequence of characters from my original message, which was “hmm…[no space]screaming hooligans outside”
- James: which gave me the initial connection error messages
- Caitlin: strange
- James: damn straight
If you haven’t guessed it yet, here is the punchline, courtesy of Stu Tomlinson from the newly-renamed Pidgin project (née Gaim):
If you try to send a message containing any of the words “.pif”, “.scr”, “download.php” or “gallery.php” the message will be silently discarded. The official client from Microsoft will provide no indication to either the sender or recipient that the message didn’t go through.
(For those of you who might not know, .scr is the extension of Windows screen-saver files, which are basically just disguised .exe’s. This makes them a popular choice for those in the business of spreading worms and viruses and so forth.)
I tried a bunch of “.scr” messages using Microsoft’s official messenger app for OS X instead of Adium, and it did tell me they weren’t sent, but only after a long delay: I would send a bunch of the messages, and then twenty or thirty seconds later I would get the error messages for all of them. Regardless, MSN gives you no indication why your message wasn’t sent, leaving people to wonder at the fickle gods of the internets for not letting them talk about screaming hooligans (or what-have-you).
I don’t know how the MSN protocol works, but it seems pretty absurd that it would be designed in such a way that this kind of nightmarish hack would become necessary in the first place. What would be even scarier, of course, is if MSN actually was a reasonably well-designed protocol, and Microsoft freely chose to subject their users to this nonsense instead of implementing one of the multitude of obviously better solutions.
