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MrMogensen · 07:20 PM

As the title says... I am looking for a MSN-client program where offline-messages actually works.

< "OM" = Offline Messages >

Microsoft MSN for Mac => Forget it (totally outdated and no OM).
Mercury => No nonsense program and liked it but no OM.
Adium => Cool program and favorite so far, but seems like no OM.
aMSN => Seemed like a slow program and sometimes OM worked sometimes not.

Have tried searching MSN at macupdate.com and the above mentioned seemed like the most popular?

Everyone on my messengerlist are non-mac-users so that probably doesn't help either.

Someone here probably has some knowledge about some other program that might do the trick?

64stang06 · Dec 1, 2009, 09:10 PM

Does Yahoo Messenger work? I know you can use that to talk to live.com/hotmail.com users, so that might be an option.

angelmb · Dec 2, 2009, 07:43 AM

Yes, offline messaging does work with Yahoo Messenger. Just a reminder, you have to login with a yahoo account, albeit you can chat with MSN accounts without any hassle, it is been a while since the last time I ran it though.

Atheist · Dec 2, 2009, 10:02 AM

Are you talking about receiving messages that were sent to you while you were offline or queueing up messages locally to an offline contact that will be sent when the contact signs on?

angelmb · Dec 2, 2009, 02:13 PM

Originally Posted by Atheist

Are you talking about receiving messages that were sent to you while you were offline …

With Yahoo Messenger you can send the messages no matter the contact is online or offline as he-she is going to receive them (as long as his-her messaging app supports offline messaging). You can receive them as well even if they were sent when you were offline. You can also reply to them even when the contact is offline.

A - you
B - offline contact

A: hello!, liked the movie?
B (offline)

Later, B goes online, signs in and the message from A shows up, B reads the message, gives a reply but now A is offline

A (offline) hello!, liked the movie?
B: hello there!, yes the movie was great!!

A goes online and fires up Yahoo Messenger, gets message from B, replies to it, B is offline

B (offline) hello there!, yes the movie was great!!
A: glad to hear you liked it!!, how are you?

Was I clear enough?.

Please note that if you open Yahoo Messenger and some offline messages show up, if you don't give a reply before closing the app, those messages are lost.

Atheist · Dec 2, 2009, 04:35 PM

I was asking because I suspect the offline messaging capabilities are a function of the Yahoo servers... not the client. I don't believe MSN servers support offline messages so it would be up to the client software to queue any outbound messages until the contact is online. So it would be hit or miss with MSN depending on what client the user has. I suspect that Yahoo must be routing MSN messages through their servers which would explain why using the Yahoo client would support offline messages with MSN contacts.

Yikes, that was a mouthful... hope it makes sense.

angelmb · Dec 2, 2009, 04:57 PM

AFAIK the Messenger client for Windows does support offline messaging, so it might be just that the Mac version is lacking most features.
BTW, wasn't Microsoft Messenger:mac version 8 supposed to be out this year… even as beta?

Atheist · Dec 2, 2009, 05:15 PM

Originally Posted by angelmb

AFAIK the Messenger client for Windows does support offline messaging, so it might be just that the Mac version is lacking most features.
BTW, wasn't Microsoft Messenger:mac version 8 supposed to be out this year… even as beta?

Well then... maybe it is a function of the client. I was just speculating based on my rather out of date knowledge of the MSN chat protocol (I wrote a chat client for Windows about 7 years ago). With regard to Messenger for OS X, I sometimes suspect that MS has about 3 programmers in their Mac Business Unit.

TheoCryst · Dec 3, 2009, 12:56 AM

It's a function of both – the server must be able to store the message while the client is offline, and the client must know how to handle the offline message.

Originally Posted by Atheist

With regard to Messenger for OS X, I sometimes suspect that MS has about 3 programmers in their Mac Business Unit.

We have a few more than three people in the unit (and a ~40 million line code base to maintain).