Microsoft censors your MSN messages

From time to time, a user emails our feedback address reporting that he tried to send a message and got this error:

Could not send; a connection error occurred.

And I never had an answer for those users, because it's quite an empty error message (“a connection error”? What kind of connection error?) and I never heard anything from the other developers about it. So I always wondered what caused that error message.

Now I've found out.

A user on the IRC channel mentioned that he had received that error message. Specifically, he started out asking whether there was a way to “fix sending of URLs through MSN”. I asked for more info, and he revealed that he got the same error message when attempting to send a URL that had a .info domain. I tried a couple such URLs myself, with David's help, and confirmed his report—even http://growl.info/ doesn't work.

The reason MSN gives for this censorship is that it's to protect users from exploits that use certain URLs. The problem with this reason is that any URL could be an exploit URL; filtering by keyword just isn't enough, because the attackers can always invent new filenames. The correct solution is simply to fix the exploits.

There's nothing we can do about this because it's done on the server. This also means that all clients are affected, not just Adium.L33tdawg: I've always had this problem on Adium for as long as I can remember and I always put it down to having a crappy net connection. This is certainly quite interesting indeed - I wonder if turning OTR encryption would effectively 'by-pass' the filter checks.