Q: iChat is logging me out of Yahoo Messenger

Hi,

Does the Yahoo site say there are any issues with what they would call third Party apps and their Server ?

10:37 pm      Thursday; July 10, 2014

Hi,

In iChat > Preferences > Accounts there is nothing you can change other than the ID you are using itself (and it's password).

Are you using any  third party network filter or Firewall  such as Little Snitch ?

I must admit this would tend to block Logging in rather than letting the connection drop.

Do you have any other Account and do they drop connections ?

7:14 pm      Friday; July 11, 2014

Hi,

I had not come across this myself but this evening (where I am) Yahoo has logged me Out and back In again twice in the past fifteen minutes.

None of my AIM or Jabber logins have dropped.

This Little Snitch pic shows the connection was remade at 2010 local time (bottom right grey text)

The AIM one was more than an hour before that when I turned the App ON

It looks like something at Yahoo's end.

8:22 pm      Friday; July 11, 2014

Hi,

Today (this evening for me) it took me nearly an hour to get signed in.

Checking the Yahoo site gives no clear indication.

ON this page the second item (At 7.35 PM my time) was about logging back in to Yahoo Messenger and was timed 2 hours earlier.

There are not responses to the question at the time I looked.

7:39 pm      Saturday; July 12, 2014

My solution was to delete ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iChat.Yahoo.plist (yes, the plist file is still named iChat, even in Yosemite).  It's been a half hour now and so far no disconnects.  Usually they happen within a minute or two.

Ignore my last post for the time being.  That didn't do the trick.  I'm looking closer at the network traffic though and might be onto something.

The Yahoo disconnects appear to be related to proxy settings.  Messages is strange in that it ignores system-wide proxy settings for GTalk and AIM, but adheres to them for Yahoo.

When it connects to Yahoo it will first try to do so through your HTTP proxy.  If it cannot connect using the HTTP proxy, it tries a SOCKS proxy (assuming that you have one configured).

In my case Yahoo would initially connect through the HTTP proxy and then disconnect.  There is some sort of exchange that goes on between the client and Yahoo after a few minutes of being connected, and it does not like doing this through the HTTP proxy.  Strangely, even after telling OS X’s network settings to bypass the the proxy for the two Yahoo-related domains that Messages seems to connect to (info.yahoo.com and messenger.yahooapis.com) these connections continued to be made through the HTTP proxy.

As I mentioned earlier, Messenger will use a SOCKS proxy to connect to Yahoo if it cannot find an HTTP proxy.  Since Messages ignores the proxy settings for AIM and GTalk, I created a rule in Little Snitch to block Messages from speaking to the HTTP proxy at all.  It is currently connecting to Yahoo through my SOCKS proxy and has remained on-line without a disconnect for an hour now.

I also tried blocking Messages from connecting to both the SOCKS and HTTP proxy using Little Snitch, assuming that it would simply attempt to connect directly to Yahoo’s servers as it does with GTalk and AIM.  Strangely, it refused to do so.

It should be noted that Messages as a process only deals with Apple’s stuff.  AIM and GTalk are handled through a process called imagent, while Yahoo is dealt with by a process named IMServicePluginAgent.  In my case, I had to block IMServicePluginAgent and Messages from using the HTTP proxy.

My scenario may not match other people’s given the slightly convoluted network configuration i have, but some of the info should be helpful in understanding how Messages works.

Hi,

That makes some sense in that the Yahoo part is a Plug-in bolt on rather then being really integrated into the App.

As a result it does not do File Transfers or any of th Audio/Video connections including Screen Sharing.

It has been known since iChat 2.1 when it went AV that the Proxy set up did not work for most people.

Early versions suggested you could set it in the App but when it used the System settings it would do better.  (relatively speaking).

8:12 p.m.      Saturday; September 5, 2015

Things were working fine for about a week or two.  It's gone back to its old habits since then and I have no idea why.  It behaves this way regardless of whether the computer is connected through a proxy or directly to the Internet.  Maybe El Capitan will solve this issue.

A couple days ago I played around with the Yahoo.imserviceplugin plist and enabled the SSL, server, and port settings.  That got me nowhere.

Hi,

It's weird as today after three attempts the yahoo account has logged in and stayed logged in for about 1/2 hour at this point.

I did look at the System Side of things and used Xcode to open the .plist but found it did not list which port is was using.  (Little Snitch says port 443 for th Login and port 80 to get the Buddy List and Buddy pics and the like).

9:37 p.m.      Monday; September 28, 2015

When I played around with the plist a couple days ago it created a huge mess.  If the port/SSL/server settings are enabled, I am not sure where the variables actually get saved.  After I tried different settings, I just deleted all of my entries (because that's what hitting the 'default' button appears to do anyway).  That's where the fun began.  I disabled Yahoo in the Internet Accounts; when I attempted to add it again, and enable Messages, it refused to do so and complained that an invalid port was being supplied.  I couldn't change the port number, because that required me to be able to enable the account again in Messages, which I couldn't   I couldn't delete the file containing the port number because I had no idea where it was.

So I ended up reverting to a Time Machine backup from an hour before.  While doing that, my cheapo SSD drive must have had something written to a bad block and it died and fell off the drive bus.  A day later and with a new SSD installed, I'm back to square one.  I don't even use Yahoo to chat with anyone anymore, so I don't know why I care about this at all.  I just can't stand broken things.

Hi,

The stuff will try to write to com.apple.ichat.Yahoo.plist in ~/Library/Preferences

AS you says though it is being read by the the Plugin itself in /Library/Messages (completely different Libraries).

9:55 p.m.      Monday; September 28, 2015