1. Supported Protocols

For protocols not supported by Empathy out-of-the-box you need to install an appropriate connection manager (protocol backend).

• AIM: install telepathy-haze

• Google Hangouts, Jabber, XMPP: install telepathy-gabble

• local network ("Bonjour" - iChat-compatible): install telepathy-salut

• ICQ: install telepathy-haze

• IRC: install telepathy-idle (see the FAQ for more notes on IRC)

• MSN: install telepathy-butterfly

• SIP: install telepathy-rakia (known as telepathy-sofiasip before version 0.7.2), and the account-plugin-sip (see the FAQ for more notes on SIP)

• Yahoo!: install telepathy-haze

1.1. Not directly supported protocols

• Facebook (dropped their chat for 3rd party apps; reverse engineering work is in progress: see purple-facebook on Github)

Various protocols supported by libpurple should theoretically work if you install telepathy-haze, but might not be very well-tested. These protocols include:

• Gadu-Gadu
• Groupwise
• Myspace
• Sametime
• SILC
• Zephyr

1.2. Note on installing

Until some D-Bus bugs have been fixed, you might need to log out and log back in to be able to create accounts using a newly installed connection manager.

We plan to integrate packagekit to install missing package, help is welcome on bug #518429

2. Protocol Troubleshooting

Here are some known issues you might have with specific protocols, with fixes and workarounds.

If you're having a problem not listed here, do not add it to this page. Instead, file a bug or ask in the Empathy chat room (#empathy on irc.gnome.org; irc://irc.gnome.org/empathy).

2.1. Yahoo

Problem: I can't add a Yahoo account in the Accounts window (e.g. it's not in the list of protocols).

Solution: Make sure telepathy-haze is installed on your system. On Ubuntu you need to run the following at a terminal:

•  sudo apt-get install telepathy-haze 

Problem: Yahoo icon blinks constantly while trying to connect but never connects.

Possible Solutions:

• DNS Problem: Change the yahoo server under Edit->Accounts->"My Yahoo Account"->Advanced from scs.msg.yahoo.com to 66.163.181.189

• Character Encoding: Change the Charset under Edit->Accounts->"My Yahoo Account"->Advanced from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1

• Firewall: Make sure your firewall is open to port 5050. If you can't use this port, try port 80 by changing as described above

Problem: Can add a Yahoo account but get a network error connecting (proxy server active)

Solution: As Yahoo uses port 5050, this port has to be able to get through. If your internet connection is via a proxy server the proxy server has to allow a port 5050 tunnel.

• In squid proxy, by default the group of SSL_ports are allowed to be tunnelled. A few ports are predefined. You can add port 5050 to these ports by adding the line
  • 'acl SSL_ports port 5050 # Empathy - Yahoo connection'
• Add the above line at the bottom of the other 'acl SSL_ports ...' lines. Everything after the '#' is a comment only
• Restart the squid proxy
• One last thing, if you don't control your proxy server, for example you use a company proxy server, you would have to ask the administrator to enable port 5050 tunnelling.

2.2. MSN

Problem: Error message "Network Error"

Possible Solution:

• Kill the running process called telepathy-butterfly and reconnect the account by unchecking and re-checking the box under Edit->Accounts. For example:

•  killall telepathy-butterfly 

2.3. ICQ

2.3.1. “Empathy can't connect to ICQ, saying only ‘Network Error’.”

As of 18^th November 2010, there's an issue which can be worked around by disabling SSL during ICQ login. Unfortunately, Empathy does not currently offer a way to do this, so you'll have to use the command line to change this option.

• Disable your ICQ account.

• In a terminal, run the following command: mc-tool update haze/icq/_3<your uin>0 bool:use-ssl=false

  • The extra '3' and '0' are deliberate!

  • For instance, if your ICQ username is '12345', run: mc-tool update haze/icq/_3123450 bool:use-ssl=false

  • If you get an unhelpful error telling you that ‘Method "GetAll" with signature "s" on interface "org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties" doesn't exist’ then use mc-tool list | grep icq to check what the identifier for your account is.

• Re-enable your ICQ account.

If this doesn't work, disable your ICQ account, wait 10 minutes, and try again.

A future release of the ICQ backend will improve the error reporting for this situation, and fix a bug which might cause your account to be locked for 10 minutes when this happens.