I had forgotten they tried to standardize the protocol!
Yeah, it was surprisingly easy. Connect to the switchboard server, set up sessions from there, and then it's all MIME. We even implemented avatars for Gaim by chunking Base64-encoded images over MIME messages (they had a max length), which MSN would ignore but Gaim would use.
We never had any trouble from the MSN team. Rumor had it at the time that at least one dev on the team was secretly a Gaim user, and they just looked the other way.
I never released it, as there were plenty of others already available at the time. It was written in pure Win32, and a single portable .exe of <32KB.
We never had any trouble from the MSN team.
Judging by the huge number of other thirdparty clients, I don't think Microsoft bothered to do anything about them, and almost treated it like they did Windows piracy --- they would rather you use a thirdparty client with MSN than a competitor's network; I suspect the fact that this was also not long after their antitrust lawsuit also had some influence.
I had forgotten they tried to standardize the protocol!
Yeah, it was surprisingly easy. Connect to the switchboard server, set up sessions from there, and then it's all MIME. We even implemented avatars for Gaim by chunking Base64-encoded images over MIME messages (they had a max length), which MSN would ignore but Gaim would use.
We never had any trouble from the MSN team. Rumor had it at the time that at least one dev on the team was secretly a Gaim user, and they just looked the other way.