Dear Lazyweb: MSN

[prog]

I am starting to suspect that you cannot send an MSN Messenger IM to someone unless both you and the intended receiver are on each others' contact lists. Is this true?

Comments

[popecrunch.livejournal.com]

Any reason Planbeast itself can't have a messenger account, with a requirement that users of the service add it to their contact list?

[prog.livejournal.com]

Sadly, yes - MS limits the number of contacts that any single user can have. We could do some terrible hackery to get around this, but I don't wanna go there.

I'm seeing if I can't get around this with some Perl wizardry, but I'm prepared to drop this as a launch requirement if I can't get it working soon. It's quite literally a bell/whistle.