It turns out that the Miranda IM client for Windows does indeed support encrypted connections on the standard XMPP port 5222. As explained by Boris Krasnovskiy on their developer list, if you are a Miranda user then you need to configure your preferences under Main Menu > Options for “port 5222″ and “Use TLS” in order to connect securely to the jabber.org service.

Our apologies for the lack of reports over the last 10 days or so — most of the jabber.org admin team was at FOSDEM 2010 / XMPP Summit #8 the weekend of February 5-8, and it takes a little while to recover from so much Jabber fun.

As you might have noticed, last Friday we installed an updated build of M-Link, which incorporates a number of fixes and has been quite a bit more stable.

There are still some unresolved issues that are being worked on by the jabber.org admin team, the Isode M-Link team, or both:

1. Communication between Google Talk and jabber.org has unacceptable lag most of the time. We’re still working to debug this problem.
2. Some old or incomplete clients simply cannot connect to the server securely since we turned off the legacy SSL-only port 5223, including Miranda (see update!), Palringo, QIP PDA, Sameplace, and old releases of clients like Kopete on KDE 3.x and iChat on OS X Tiger. Although most clients are working just fine on port 5222 with encryption upgrade using STARTTLS, we will turn port 5223 on again in the near future (this requires a new build from Isode because they never expected that people still needed port 5223, given that it was deprecated in 2004!).
3. Room logs are not enabled yet for posting to logs.jabber.org. We should have those working again in the next week.
4. New user registration is not working yet at register.jabber.org. We’ll try to have it working again this week or next (there are some backend changes required). Until then, feel free to create an account at one of the many other XMPP-based IM services.

We think those are the main issues at this time, but as always feel free to join the jabber@conference.jabber.org chatroom via XMPP or HTTP if you have questions or comments.

– Peter Saint-Andre

As you might have noticed, the jabber.org IM service has been much more stable in the last few days, thanks to a number of bug fixes from our friends at Isode. There are still several known issues that have been fixed in M-Link, but both Isode personnel and jabber.org admins are travelling this week for the XMPP Summit in Brussels this weekend, so we won’t deploy any updated software builds until sometime next week. This will also give Isode’s QA department an opportunity to complete some more thorough testing than was possible while we were all in “crisis mode” over the last two weeks. Finally, we are also still working to pinpoint some remaining issues (such as delayed and even dropped messages from gmail.com to jabber.org), which the admin team will discuss with the Isode team this weekend. If pertinent information becomes available, we will post again in the next few days. Thanks again for your patience during the recent migration.

Peter Saint-Andre