iChat stuck offline

Thanks Videomyster! Killing imagent fixed the issue for me too! You rock! 🙂

Disabling and re-enabling each affected account was what worked for me.

This issue looks like a bug in Lion.

I killed imagent even while iChat was still running and instantly all my accounts went online. Thanks for the great workaround!

Hi,

iChatAgent in iChat 1 though 5 and IMAgent in Lion is the bit that Logs the accounts for iChat.

As people are saying they can't login it makes sense to change the one thing that might effect that.

If you are logged in you don't have the issue and "Killing" the Process will take the accounts Off Line.

Restarting iChat will bring them back On Line.

8:12 PM Monday; September 19, 2011

Please, if posting Logs, do not post any Log info after the line "Binary Images for iChat"

 G4/1GhzDual MDD (Leopard 10.5.8)
 MacBookPro 2Gb( 10.6.8)
 Mac OS X (10.6.8),
"Limit the Logs to the Bits above Binary Images."  No, Seriously

Here is a tutorial someone made which is exactly what worked for me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UweTTO3SJec

Quitting the imagent process worked for me.

Sic the lion on that bug.

Also, is it possible that imagent came from aim.com, if you downloaded aim from aim.com ?

How would you uninstall that?

ooops, never mind, I guess I should have read the previous posts.

Okay, let me join the chorus here of people with this problem. And yes, killing imagent works..... every single time it happens. That's getting really old. I know Apple owes us a permanent fix, hopefully soon, but is there some other method that will work? This happens to me daily. I'm using iChat for AIM and gchat. Both accounts are stuck offline, usually in the morning when I wake my computer up. Killling imagent and resettting my status to online usually does the trick (sometimes I have to restart iChat). But having to do this every day is driving me nuts.

Hi,

In some cases this is about the Ownership and Permissions of either the Keychain (that holds the Passwords) or the .plists for iChat (That holds the Account/Screen Name details)

As Not only iChat but the new Contacts, Mail and Calendar System Preferences Pane also holds the iChat, Face Time and other info it can sometimes pay to delete the ScreenName/Accounts in iChat and re-add them.

Ralph

(posted from a Boot in Tiger)

I was having the same problem, and killing "imagent" worked for me.

Thanks! This worked for me.

Ditto on symptoms. All iChat accounts were offline and were unresponsive to any attempt to become Available.

Issue resolved via iChat preference panel. From the Accounts tab, select each account and disable it. Close preferences to save changes. Re-open preference panel, reactivate each account. Problem solved.

This solution remained working through the quit and re-launch of iChat as well as a comp restart and relaunch.

Videomyster wrote:

I don't use Litle Snitch or anything fancy. You shouldn't need to restart or do the whole PRAM thing.

1st, Quit iChat.

2nd, Open Activity Monitor in your Applications->Utilities. From there, look for "imagent" and quit it.

3rd, Start iChat.

Enjoy!

Thanks @Videomyster that worked for me!

Messages is very buggy to say the least.

I finaly just figured out why mine wouldn't go online, and it is just another Apple bug.

In the accounts, I had iMessage as the only enagles one, my Bonjour and Google Talk were disabled intentionaly.

Wel, even though I could open a new message and initiate a conversation, I couldn't get it to go online.

I had to enable Boujour, and not it goes online.

This makes no sense whatsoever, and I hope Apple fixes it.

Bonjour must be enabled.

Also, other Messages and FaceTime bugs I had, I couldn't get the iMesssges protocol to work at all on my 2nd backup computer, and would get some strange message to call AppleCare.

I had to work with them many times to get my account to work on my other computer.

It worked fine on my main computer, but not my other ones, even logged into my own user account.

It seems that Apple has total comtrol over your Apple ID account and they can turn it off and on per computer.

It took them several calls to get them to enable my account on my other computers.

Other apps that use Apple ID worked just fine, it only failed in Messages and FacedTime.