* What are the 'Message for NNN queued for delivery' and 'Flushing messages
to...' and what do they do?
When you send a message to someone, the client has to open a connection first;
as this takes time, the message is put in a queue until the connection is
ready, and then they are sent.
The 'Message for NNN queued for delivery' tells you that the message has been
queued, then, a connection is tried to establish, and once this is done, the
messages in the queue are sent, and you are told with 'Flushing messages
to...'.
The connection is not done for every message, so you don't see this every
time, but usually only once for the first message.
* What's the meaning of 'User NNN is typing' and why only appears once?
Those are special messages telling you that the user 'NNN' is typing a
message, and are sent by the client. Note that this msn client does _not_ send
these messages.
You only see them one because they are usually sent every 5 seconds, which
makes them highly annoying, so the client only displays one. If you want to
know the last time one of these messages was sent, you can do it using the
'info' command.
* How does tab completion work?
At this moment, it's simple and very basic: you can cycle through the person
who last you received a message from, and the one you last sent one to.
Note that this cycling only works when the commandline is empty, or when you
have previosuly tabbed.
* How does auto-away work?
It's quite simple: you configure it in your msnrc file, using a line like
'auto away = SECS' where SECS is the number of seconds after that, if you
didn't type anything, you're automatically set to away.
Then, when you come back and type, your status is automatically changed back
to online.
Note that this will work only when your status is online, because if i'm
'busy' i don't want it going back to away =)
* Where are my log files, and what's the format to read them?
The log files are kept by default in $HOME/.msn/history, but it can be changed
using the 'history directory' option in your msnrc file.
The format is described in doc/log_format.
* What are the different ways of sending messages?
You have three basic commands for sending messages:
The first one is 'm' (or its alias, 'msg'), which takes a nick or an email as
a parameter, and sends a message to that person. This is what tab completion
types for you.
The other two are the 'a' and 'r' messages; 'a' sends a message to the last
person you sent a message to; and 'r' replies a message to the last person you
received a message from.
* What's the reverse contact list?
It's simply the list of all the people who have you on their contact list. You
can see it with the 'wr' command.
* How do the privacy option work? What is it for?
The privacy option lets you set if you want people to ask you for
authorization to add you (i never implemented user authorization, so i have no
idea about how or if this works), and to block messages from people which are
not on your list. This is all done by the server so no permanent configuration
is needed.
The command is called 'privacy', and has two parameters, called 'a' and 'p';
which are set to 1 (yes) or 0 (no), and come from 'Authorization' and
'Privacy', the two policies we just talked about'.
So, if you don't want to receive messages from people which are not on your
list, but you want people to add you without any authorization, the command
would be 'privacy 0 1'.
* Is there a way of enabling debugging without it getting in the middle of my
session?
Sure, just run "msn 2> msn.debug.output"; it will redirect stderr (where debug
messages go) to the file called 'msn.debug.output'. Remember to enable
debugging too, using either the 'debug' command or adding 'debug = yes' to the
msnrc file.
* Why does the contact list has this weird order?
The order in the contact list is given by the email addresses, which obviously
has no reference whatsoever to the nicks; so even if it looks unsorted, you
notice an alphabetic sort quite clearly when you do 'ww'.
* I get 'Main socket closed' followed by a strange error everyonce in a while
Output sample:
[msn] status invisible
Status changed to: invisible
[msn]
Main socket closed ((104, 'Connection reset by peer'))
Closing
;
This happens when some unexpected network error occurs. It depends highly on
the error, but most of the times it's because the MSN server has closed our
main connection without reason, or our internet connection just dropped. There
isn't much we can do about it; we could reconnect and that's on the TODO list.
But if you get these errors normally, after checking your internet connection
(it could be just that) please send me the error report (a copy/paste of the
output would be just fine).