How to use iChat to chat with your MSN contacts

If you are an iChat fan like me you would just like this. Thanks to Apple’s updates to iChat, now supporting Jabber protocol [support GTalk], you can use iChat to chat with buddies on MSN, Yahoo, … etc.

The process is a little tricky, so let’s start …

What you need

1. A GTalk account.

2. Install Psi – A cross platform Jabber client and install it - http://psi-im.org/

Steps

1. Open Psi

2. Add your Google Account

- Select General / Account Setup

- Select Add and enter your account name

- Select your created account and press the modify button

- The account detail window contains 5 tabs [Account / Details / Privacy / Connection / Misc], you will need to
configure the Account and Connection Tabs.

- [Screenshot 1] : Select the Account Tab, enter your gmail email in the Jabber ID and enter your mail password in the password field.

- [Screenshot 2] : Select the Connection Tab, check every box under Advanced. That means “Use SSL encryption,” “Ignore SSL warnings,” “Allow Plaintext Login,” “Send Keep-alive packets,” and “Manually Specify Server Host/Port”. Enter the following data, Host: “talk.google.com” and the Port:”5223″

- Now your account is ready, you can right click on the account and select status online.

3. Register your other IM services with a transport server

- Now comes the magic part. Connect your Google Talk account with Psi by right-clicking the account name, then Status, and then Online.

- Now right-click the account name a second time and click Service Discovery. You need to find a Jabber transport server that will bridge the gap between your Google Talk and non-Gtalk chat applications. The server I used for my set up is “jaim.at”

- [Screenshot 3]: Enter the server name into the Address field and click Browse. If all works well, you should see a list of available transports

- To set up one of your IM accounts, just right-click the appropriate transport server (AIM, MSN, Yahoo etc.) and select Register. Then just add your username and password, click the Register button, and voila, Psi will ask you to confirm all of your newly transported contacts in your Google Talk account. Once you do, they’ll all automatically be available through your Google Talk account wherever you go.

4. Now just set up you iChat to use you GTalk account and voila …

But take care, using a transport server does mean that you’re trusting your information to a third-party server, which isn’t always the most fun to do …