Friday, November 6, 2009

strangers contacting me on Live Messenger

On all of my MSN / Live Messenger accounts I disallowed, that people not on my contact list, can send me messages. Still I keep getting IMs from strangers. How come???

No, I didn't google for this phenomenon. Actually I'm not sure, how to express this with 3 to 5 words to be put in a Google search, so that I don't receive mostly irrelevant hits.

Actually I mostly don't use the Live Messenger client itself but pidgin. But of course: the client shouldn't make a difference there. (Actually it does, as I found out later during my research. See below!!)

Anybody any idea?

Update: now that I expressed this thing here, I was able to do a Google search (with the title of this story here), and found this. Didn't help me either, but maybe others will find it helpful.

Another update: looks like actually the client IM software needs to do the blocking, and I found the right settings in pidgin to do that. There is a privacy menu entry (Tools > Privacy), and you have to select "allow only the users on my buddy list" on every single account, if that's what you want -- and I certainly do.

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