Collection of MSN clients

Hi, I’ve been working on an MSN server over the last half a year or so (on and off, when I’ve had the motivation to tinker), and I just discovered you’ve beaten me to it! Although I’m slightly disappointed that I didn’t get there first, I’m very glad somebody else has done it - I wanted to see MSN live on, and luckily so did you guys, so that’s great. :slight_smile:

Anyway, Escargot seems to be tidier and further along than my own efforts, so I don’t have a whole lot to offer, but what I do have is a nice healthy collection of MSN clients I’ve been gathering and testing, and I thought you guys might like them. I’ve just uploaded them to Archive.org, you can find them here: MSN Messenger Collection.

There are 118 builds, some of which are 9x/XP versions of MSN Messenger/Windows Messenger 4.x.x. I’ve also included protocol version and CVR ident information. Hope you find them useful, took me a bit of digging to find them, and it’s definitely not a full collection - many seem lost to time, particularly early (1.x) versions and those which were betas/leaks and got quickly superceded by fixed versions, but I think I got a nice spread across the years. I’ve also documented them (well, loosely speaking, it’s very vague and not particularly detailed) here (MSN Messenger History), where I’ve put the same version/protocol version/ident info plus some screenshots for any version I was able to make functional with my server.

Once again, good job on keeping MSN alive, great to see someone else still cares to preserve it. :slight_smile:

Edit: Whoops, you can’t see the protocol/CVR info from that Archive.org link, just the files, this one has the description with that info in: Here.

Edit 2: Now uploaded the collection of Windows clients provided by @tristanleboss which can be found here: MSN Messenger Collection 2.

Added new wiki page with both collections and version info here: https://gitlab.com/valtron/msn-server/wikis/MSN-Messenger-Client-Downloads

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ONE OF US, ONE OF US

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Haha, yes, seems so. I’ve been enjoying the challenge. I’m not the world’s best programmer by any stretch of the imagination but I’ve learnt some things along the way, I might still finish what I’m able to just for the fun of it, but it seems a bit redundant now that Escargot exists :stuck_out_tongue:

I have MSN Messenger 6.1 working, so if logs of that would help anybody I’d be happy to provide those. I also have (had?) WLM 8.x “working”, but it’s a total hackjob, auth isn’t performed properly (basically just enough to satisfy the client to make it think it’s connected correctly), and I haven’t done the HTTPS SOAP contact list stuff really either, I just put together barely enough that the clients would log on. I also couldn’t seem to make any client requiring SSO auth work either (WLM 9.0 seems especially picky), so I was mainly sticking to working on 7.5 and below.

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OMG, you have 8? Can you send me a wireshark dump of the traffic for a successful connection so I can see what I’m doing wrong?

6.1 would also be nice to get working, which specific version were you using?

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It seems like we are a few to do the exact same thing :wink:

I was collecting as much data as possible on Messenger and was wondering who did these WordPress blogs with info about Messenger… I saved them using HTTrack… just in case.

I am downloading your MSN clients and adding them to my personal Messenger vault which is currently arround 50 gb of clients in various languages!

@valtron Maybe you should open issues (like “Login problem on 6.1”, “Login problem on 8.0”) regarding the diffferent thing you’re working on so people can gather trying to help you :wink: A bit like what we did for 7.5

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Yeah, it’s time to be more organized.

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I’ve tested all of the versions of 6.1 that are available in the file dump above, so:

6.1.0114
6.1.0128
6.1.0150
6.1.0211

According to my notes they all work fine, so I can provide MSNP traffic and auth stuff.

As for 8.x, as I say (and this is the case with all TWN-era clients on my server), it’s a total hackjob and it barely works, but if it’s any help I can show you what I’ve got so far. You’ll see in the screenshots on my “documentation” mentioned in the original post that the contact lists are barebones (and in some cases don’t work at all), so it’s literally just enough to convince the client to connect, hardcoded examples stuffed into the code with no actual connectivity to the real contact list data. But sure, if that’s enough to be useful then I’d be happy to provide it, I guess it could at least be used as a template or a few clues, right?

Also, 8.x seems very picky, I have 4 betas from 8.0 able to connect, 2 betas + 1 release version of 8.1 able to connect, and 1 beta + 2 release versions of 8.5 able to connect. That leaves 11 of the versions I have (mostly 8.0) unable to connect, and I’m not really sure why. It’s weird how even between fairly similar builds they just stop and start being able to connect. The betas might be trying to connect somewhere I haven’t covered, but I’m not sure, they might just be very picky about protocol stuff.

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Just provide them on the development tracker: Login problem on MSN Messenger 6.1 (#7) · Issues · Escargot / Escargot Server · GitLab

This way everyone can have a look and try to help… some collabroative bug solving :wink:

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Welcome @enhanox :slight_smile:

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One of us! One of us! One of us!

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OMG i love you all Escargot Engineers!!! <3

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Without the escargot engineers, I would have probably gave up trying to revive msn tbh.

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ok, time for 8 installer (dont scream):

that will push development maybe a bit…

We already have Windows Messenger 8 :wink: The only thing that could make things go faster is a Python developer to help valtron and a reverser; someone able to disassemble code (for WLM 2012 and 2009) because I am reaching the limit of my own abilities in this field.

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i have 2011, vista

hang on, its 2012, said 2011 on website hmmm

installer file ver: 15.4.3555.308

oh wait i meant version 2011, ah ok, THEN WHAT IS WITH ALL THESE DIFFERENT VERSION NUMBERS

Can you stop writing one line in each message. That’s really annoying. I receive an email each times.
This is a forum not a chat system.

Btw, we already have all versions of Messenger.

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