Re: Synchronizing MSN and Fire

On Dec 29, 2004, at 6:01 PM, Robert Haddock wrote:

> Is there any way to synchronize MSN and Fire's MSN List?
>
> I had more than 200 names in my Fire MSN list.  Hardly ever used MSN.
> But then people would send me messages and I could not reply to them, 
> so I
> switched to MSN.

The most likely reason that people wouldn't be able to reply is that 
you have the "Don't allow non-buddies to see when I'm online" 
preference ticked.  In the case of MSN, this rule is enforced by the 
MSN server.  As you note below, MSN only allows a maximum of 150 
buddies at a time -- when in Fire the MSN server considers the extra 47 
buddies to be "non-buddies" as they do not appear on the servers' buddy 
list.

> I discovered only 153 names in my MSN list - 47 less than my Fire 
> list.  I
> also discovered that MSN only allows 150 names.

Correct.

> Synchronizing these two lists looks like a nightmare.  My Fire list 
> appears
> with the person's name first (then the email address in parentheses).  
> The
> MSN list appears with a constantly changing tag name and the only way 
> to see
> the email address is to mouse over the tag name.  There appears to be 
> no way
> to print out the MSN list in any kind of alphabetical order.  The two 
> lists
> appear to be completely out of synch.

I'm not really sure how you expect to synchronise the lists.  The MSN 
servers enforce a limit of 150 buddies -- there is no way that I am 
aware of to add more than 150 buddies to your MSN buddy list.  If you 
want to find out which buddies are in Fire's buddy list but not on the 
MSN buddy list, you should check Fire's console window as Jason 
mentioned.  If you would like to reduce Fire's buddy list to only 
contain those buddies found on the MSN buddy list, then that is 
possible if a little bit messy at present.

This is a case that should have better error handling -- although it's 
not very common it is confusing when buddies cannot reply to messages.

Regards,

Mark Rowe
<http://bdash.net.nz/>