I can get to my MSN Messenger contact list through my Skype

It’s been ever since Skype has officially taken WLM’s place.

What server is Skype using & how come it’s still got my MSN Messenger contact list?

Is it possible if we can make a WLM clone that uses Skype’s server?

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@TReKiE @valtron

That’s the plan, we’re just running into tons of problems even doing the basic stuff like login. But I do hope to eventually translate all the MSNP traffic to go to Skype’s official servers.

It’s own :wink:
Joking aside, it would be quite interesting to know some of these technical details. Certainly some of the prior Messenger IPs now host Skype servers. On the software side, the former .NET Messenger Service was written in managed code (C#) and I would presume the Skype backend software was re-written in the same since Microsoft’s purchase of the company.

Microsoft transitioned Messenger contacts to what they called the Address Book Clearing House (ABCH) in 2004, which merged the Messenger contacts and Hotmail contacts. When they began the Skype “merge” you see quoted above from wikipedia, the Skype contacts were kept separate from the Microsoft account ABCH lists and when you “linked” a Microsoft account with a Skype account, the Skype server logged into Messenger/accessed the ABCH contacts separately when you logged into Skype. You could even observe it when you logged in, as it would do one before the other.

In the past year or so, they’ve been converting all Microsoft account contacts into Office 365, which is now what powers Sign in to Outlook. I always suspected this was the cause of some of the contact list difficulties just prior to the shut down on the 19th, and also suspect the completion of this conversion was a key part of what allowed them to do away with MSNP21. How this new Office 365 infrastructure works with the Skype contacts, I have no idea as it’s not too obvious what’s going on just from observing.

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What do you mean when you say “allowed them to do away with msp21”???

@alzcore397 It sounds like while there were still unconverted accounts, they could only be used through MSNP21. Once everything was in Office365, nothing needed to use MSNP21 anymore (since WLM was unsupported since 2013), and they could shut down the servers.

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Sounds interesting, man! :smile:

Any leads about how to get our contact list back? :smile:

I guess it depends what your goal is in getting the contact list.

You can get the list of contacts itself by going to: Outlook – free personal email and calendar from Microsoft
(or if you’re having difficulty getting there, within Outlook.com People, choose Manage and then Export contacts)

In the Export dialog you choose Contacts from this folder and choose WindowsLive Contacts. Then choose Export at the top.

You then have a csv file with your contacts in it you can open in Notepad, Excel, or other applications that can parse csv.

Random knowledge: I wrote a little not-so-good program to parse the csv files into the ctt files that Messenger can import in 2003. It won’t work properly with these csv files from Outlook.com though and there wouldn’t be too much point in importing them to the Escargot accounts really.

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The import by file wizard cannot be opened. when clicking on Contacts > import contacts from file.
after going through that the wizard should have opened already but it has not opened at all.

On which version and Windows platform?

I am using windows xp sp3 and msn messenger v7.0 (of course this was before the new patch came into place).

Speaking of Skype/MSN contacts, I got a message from Skype of how my MSN contacts are now Skype contacts.
Interesting why they would send me this.

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Thanks for this, someone in a blog comment referring to something about this before but never came back to elaborate what the actual message was. I haven’t seen this message myself (yet).

I would guess this is how they are doing away with the final part of the Messenger infrastructure, just assign Skype names to the contacts and kill the rest off. Based on the “not being delivered” part, it’s a work in progress I would imagine.

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I have successfully imported my contacts from outlook.com outlook mail.
to do that:

download your contacts in a .csv file from outlookcom webmail

Then edit the csv file with notepad (not notepad++) and replace it with this code:

   <?xml version="1.0"?>
<messenger>
  <service name=".NET Messenger Service">
    <contactlist>
      <contact>contact email address inserted here</contact>
      <contact></contact>
      <contact></contact>
      <contact></contact>
      <contact></contact>
      <contact></contact>
      <contact></contact>
      <contact></contact>
      <contact></contact>
      <contact></contact>
      <contact></contact>
      <contact></contact>
      <contact></contact>
      <contact></contact>
      <contact></contact>
      <contact></contact>
      <contact></contact>
      <contact></contact>
      <contact></contact>
      <contact></contact>
      <contact></contact>
      <contact></contact>
      <contact></contact>
      <contact></contact>
      <contact></contact>
      <contact></contact>
      <contact></contact>
      <contact></contact>
      <contact></contact>
    </contactlist>
  </service> 
</messenger>

Name the file anynameyouwant.ctt and you are ready to import into msn messenger.

How I got my messenger contacts:

Since WLM is dead, i have NO contacts in my outlook contact list. i got them back with the following method:

Install WLM 16 (2012)

-> open live messenger
-> accept the agreement
-> wait
-> close the problemshooting notification
-> click “options”
-> go to “Connection”
-> clear the protocol
-> tick for saving the server protocol
-> click OK
-> try to connenct
-> wait
-> close the problemshooting notification
-> click “options”
-> go to “Connection”
-> click “show protocol”

now an editor file opens

-> maximize the window

scroll down for the half of the document, now you can (probably) see all of your contacts.

If you have already installed and used WLM , try this:

-> Clear the entire Live registry (regedit -> Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Live)
-> open live messenger
-> accept the agreement
-> wait
-> close the problemshooting notification
-> click “options”
-> go to “Connection”
-> clear the protocol
-> tick for saving the server protocol
-> click OK
-> try to connenct
-> wait
-> close the problemshooting notification
-> click “options”
-> go to “Connection”
-> click “show protocol”

now an editor file opens

-> maximize the window

scroll down for the half of the document, now you can see (probably) all of your contacts.

When playing with Windows Live Messenger 16, I discovered that once logged, WLM 16 still manage to contact a server to receive the contact lists.

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Yes. So we just have to make it “understand” MSNP24 (Skype Protocol).

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Windows Live Mail 2012 can access contacts too still. Calendar access as well.

also my outlook is outlook_5BDB06F19A073A55@outlook.com for some reason