[OTR-users] Dropped large messages with Pidgin 2.5.5, OTR plugin, and Yahoo

Ian Goldberg ian at cypherpunks.ca
Wed Mar 18 18:12:00 EDT 2009


On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 05:02:30PM -0500, Doug Breaux wrote:
> I'm not sure when this started, but I did recently upgrade my Pidgin
> to 2.5.5 and I know that now if I send large messages encrypted with
> OTR over Yahoo (problem seemed to not occur over GTalk), they are
> dropped silently.
> 
> I used to at least see a string of error messages when this kind of
> defect existed, but now neither I nor the recipient receive any
> indication at all.  (Me that there was a problem or him that any
> message was sent.)

Weird.  It sounds like the max message size of the Yahoo protocol has
gotten smaller (or maybe pidgin 2.5.5 adds more overhead?).

You can try this:

In your pidgin/purple directory (the same directory your
otr.private_keys file is in), make a text file called
otr.max_message_size and put this line in it:

prpl-yahoo	800

that's a tab between the protocol name and the number.

See if that works.  Try slightly smaller numbers if it doesn't.  [The
default for yahoo is 832.]

Please report back if making this number smaller fixes things.  (Or if
it doesn't, I guess.)

Thanks,

   - Ian



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