Hi! Is there a chance to use Escargot on Mac? I tried to use it on Wine, and it works! 
I would ask you if it is possible to use that with mac version of messenger 
Sorry for my bad english but i’m italian xD
2 Likes
It might be, although maybe not just yet. Mesesnger:Mac goes all the way down to MSN Protocol 13 however there might be issues with authentication as seen in MSN Messenger 7.5 on Windows.
With regards to Wine, which version of Messenger were you trying? I haven’t had time to try myself and as you would expect, all the Messenger 7.0 appdb reviews are ancient, so I’m curious if it has improved since or if you were using an older version.
Unfortunately it doesn’t work very well with Wine… except for MSN 1.0, 2.0+, and 3.0.
I cannot understand why in MSN 4.0 and higher, it doesn’t work the changing of the account (it automatically login and I can’t stop it), the sending of a message and also the inserting of my ID and fictitious Password (to login on my account I have pasted my email and fictitious password from somewhere)…
So sad 
I would try to login with some others messenger clients such as WLM 8.0 and higher…
Always using your msn-switcher-1.3.1, but I don’t know if it could really works…
Then, I don’t know what means “???” on the status bar of messenger clients posted on Escargot website… Could you explain me? XD
The current way I connect to MSN on my MacBook is to have a Parallels VM of Windows 7 with MSN Messenger. It’s a much better way of using MSN on a Mac without Wine.
Also, I think a problem we may see with a native OS X MSN app is that we might not get one till the Office 2008 version due to earlier versions requiring PowerPC which PPC apps are not supported from Lion to macOS Sierra.
@marko4800 “???” means I’m not sure if it’s possible to ever support those versions, so no promises.
I also have a mac and use msn 7.5 on parallels windows xp but one day I installed messenger:mac 7.0 on my mac and it installed very well on macOS sierra but couldn’t login due to no modifications available. for now i am very happy with my windows xp msn messenger system setup. 
I’ve been experimenting with Mac versions on my own server, with varying levels of success. The native Mac versions, or at least some of them, seem to work fine connecting to an unofficial server. They should behave more or less like the Windows versions, although it depends which version of MacOS you’re running.
Here’s the info I have for Mac versions:
Version: 1.0r065
Protocol: MSNP3?
CVR: macmsgs/macmsgs?
MacOS version: 9.2.x?
Version: 2.5.1 (About dialog says 2.5.0, but client reports 2.5.1 when connecting)
Protocol: MSNP5/6
CVR: macmsgs/macmsgs
MacOS version: 9.2.x?
Version 2.0r37
Protocol: MSNP5/6
CVR: macmsgs/macmsgs
MacOS version: 10.2.0+?
Version 2.0r44
Protocol: MSNP5/6
CVR: macmsgs/macmsgs
MacOS version: 10.2.0+?
Version: 2.1.0
Protocol: MSNP5/6
CVR: macmsgs/macmsgs
MacOS version: 10.2.0+?
Version: 3.0.0
Protocol: MSNP5/6/7
CVR: macmsgs/macmsgs
MacOS version: 10.1.0+
Version: 3.5.1
Protocol: MSNP8
CVR: macmsgs/macmsgs
MacOS version: 10.2.0+?
Version: 4.0.1
Protocol: MSNP8
CVR: macmsgs/macmsgs
MacOS version: 10.2.0+?
Version: 5.1.1
Protocol: MSNP9
CVR: macmsgs/macmsgs
MacOS version: 10.3.0+?
Version 6.0.3
Protocol: MSNP13/14
CVR: macmsgs/macmsgs
MacOS version: 10.3.0+?
Version: 7.0.1
Protocol: MSNP13/14
CVR: macmsgs/macmsgs
MacOS version: 10.4.0+?
Version: 7.0.2
Protocol: MSNP13/14
CVR: macmsgs/macmsgs
MacOS version: 10.4.0+?
Version: 7.0.3
Protocol: MSNP13/14
CVR: macmsgs/macmsgs
MacOS version: 10.4.0+?
Version: 8.0.0
Protocol: Probably MSNP16?
CVR: Probably macmsgs/macmsgs like all the others?
MacOS version: 10.5.0+?
Version: 8.0.1
Protocol: MSNP16 (thanks @TReKiE)
CVR: Probably macmsgs/macmsgs like all the others?
MacOS version: 10.5.0+?
Version: 8.0.2 - Final version, recommends upgrading to Skype
Protocol: Probably MSNP16?
CVR: Probably macmsgs/macmsgs like all the others?
MacOS version: 10.5.0+?
So basically 6.0.x and above are incompatible with Escargot (because they use newer protocols), Messenger for Mac 5.x might work, I haven’t tested them with Escargot. That only leaves you with very old (and PPC-only) versions, so unless you have an old PowerPC-based Mac with either MacOS 9.2 or MacOS X 10.2 or higher, I guess you’re out of luck for the moment. Running Messenger for Mac 5.x under Rosetta on Leopard might work, but I haven’t tested that, as I don’t have an Intel Mac to try it on.
With my own server I’ve been able to get a number of these native Mac clients working, using host files and manually installing SSH certificates, and they don’t seem to be substantially different to the Windows versions as far as the server is concerned. If you do have a machine that can still run these old clients, and if you’re lucky, it might be possible to connect them up to Escargot with a little bit of tweaking.
3 Likes
That would be wonderful to have a working msn messenger on mac. though I did say it was 7.0 it does make a different about which protocol is used. The msn messenger on windows is fine for now until we progress further into getting more than that working on mac.
The method I used relied on host files and SSL certificates, as I was spoofing the original servers, so the clients didn’t have to be modified. I haven’t yet looked into how Escargot works with regard to patching, but I’m guessing that since the URLs are all different it would just fail. I’m not familiar with typical Mac executable modification, but a hex editor might be sufficient to test/patch with, as the URLs look to be the same lengths (by design, I guess?)
I haven’t looked at Messenger Mac, but wouldn’t be suprised if it could be patched by just editing the files. I remember there’s a way to “right click” on an App and open it as a folder to take a look at the files inside it, try that and look at the files in a hex editor/grep them for messenger.hotmail.com/PassportURLs/nexus.passport.com.
the URLs look to be the same lengths (by design, I guess?)
Yep.
8.0.1 uses MSNP16.
Great, thanks.
For some reason I was unable to make Messenger for Mac 8.x.x connect to my server, even to get a VER, probably a missing host file entry or something, but now we know. 
I’ll take a look and see if I can’t figure out a Mac client or two in the coming days, at least to work out the basics of how to do it.
2 Likes
So I just thought I would share this with everyone. the messenger file for mac is located in resources folder but the file that contains the urls is actually the terminal file in MacOS folder. here is the screenshot of the terminal file in my text editor. i am not entirely sure if this would work which is why I made a copy of the file in my downloads folder first to ensure the whole thing doesn’t be messed up when changed and that I would be able to change it back to the way it was before I change it.
also here is a screenshot of the file in the actual folder.
I’m trying with Messenger:Mac 6.0.3 (MSNP13) but it complains about SSL certificates. I modified server strings in the executable with Hex Fiend. Any idea?
No idea because I am not sure whether this is correct.
I think I found the source of this problem, Microsoft Messenger 6.0.3 is trying to use SSLv2 protocol while MSN Messenger 7.5 (for Windows) is using TLSv1.2.
SSLv2 is not allowed by Escargot servers.
Maybe it would work in a local server allowing SSLv2. I don’t know how to patch the client to use TLS instead, as the protocols allowed by the server are TLSv1.0, TLSv1.1 and TLSv1.2.
4 Likes
it’s very much appreciated for this information you found. we are getting closer to solving this for the mac users 
1 Like
I circumvented the certificate issue using HTTP proxy, but as MSNP13+ is not supported, it doesn’t log in.
At least it talks with Escargot server
2 Likes
Still no way to have this functional on macOS ?
I tried to edit hex but it doesn’t worked 
3 Likes