kichat - Unable to add Buddy in iChat and related issues

*Unable to add Buddy in iChat and related issues*

This FAQ was generated in response to this thread and others.

In recent months there have been constant login problems with iChat and the AIM Servers.

I say "constant" because in the past AIM periodically would appear to clear out old Screen names they thought were not being used (about every 4 months.)

This would cause Synching problems for lots of people's Buddy Lists because names they had in their Buddy Lists were removed if deemed unused.

With the coming of Leopard, iChat 4 is able to perform SSL logins to the AIM Servers. However this seems to drop connections more often than the regular connections. Also Googletalk has added the AIM protocols to their application further increasing the number of users on the AIM servers, and the number of servers.

It appears that when iChat loses contact with the AIM servers it tries to log in again automatically. This seems to be happening for large numbers of people all at once. From there it appears that some people are getting an Automatic response that they have logged in too many times. Following this people seem to get incomplete Logins with only partial Buddy List info coming back to them as listed below.

There are reports of people finding they:

1. Cannot see Buddies On-line they know are.
2. Cannot add new Buddies.
3. Cannot see the Buddy List with any Buddies in it.
4. Cannot get the Buddy list to appear and have no access to Preferences.

These related problems follow being kicked off AIM's login and iChat trying multiple times until an Error message about too many attempts appears. What then seems to happen is an incomplete Login at a later stage resulting in the above symptoms.

There are different levels of "cure" that work for different people depending upon which symptom they have. Symptoms 1 through 3 may be fixed by deleting /Users/username/Library/Preferences/com.apple.ichat.AIM.plist

Sometimes for Symptom 3 /Users/username/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iChatAgent.plist should also be deleted. iChat needs restarting after each deletion.

Symptom 4 is a bit more involved as quitting iChat does not quit iChatAgent that runs in the Background. For this you have to use Activity Monitor (In Applications/Utilities and use the Quit button on iChatAgent and confirm a Force Quit) before deleting the two files above.

Some of these Symptoms are also caused by the relationship iChat has with the Address Book - because you cannot add a Buddy to iChat if the name is already in the Address Book. In iChat 3 and earlier you used to get a clear "Feedbag" error message but this does not seem to happen in iChat 4.

Feedbag errors were also reported on a full Buddy list although the numbers were different for each.



5:39 PM Monday; March 24, 2008