A number of you have reported being unable to sign into Yahoo! using Adium 1.2.2. We’ve discovered the problem; this post is to tell you what we did wrong and what we’re doing about it.

When you enter a Yahoo! email address (such as jdoe@yahoo.com) into the username field in Adium 1.2 and later, Adium strips off the @yahoo.com part before trying to sign in with it. This is because Yahoo! expects only the jdoe part (the username); signing in with the whole email address will result in an unknown-username error.

Back on the 11th of February, Evan committed this change:

Yahoo accounts shouldn’t include the @domain.suffix regardless of what it is (e.g. @yahoo.com, @yahoo.it). Generalize our removal to account for this.

Before that change, we looked for “@yahoo.com” specifically, and removed it if present. This didn’t work for other Yahoo! suffixes, such as “@yahoo.it”. Thus, Evan intended to make Adium delete all Yahoo! suffixes, not just the US one.

The code that Evan committed removes any email-address suffix—in other words, if there’s an @, Adium will remove that and anything after it before trying to log in. This was a good plan, except for those who use Yahoo! AT&T.

SBC was a US telephone company, which became AT&T back in 2005. SBC offered, and AT&T still offers, an internet connection with Yahoo! services bundled, including Yahoo! Messenger. Instead of a plain old “jdoe” username, these customers’ Yahoo! IDs are their entire “jdoe@sbcglobal.net” address. For these users, stripping off the “@sbcglobal.net” suffix makes sign-in not work.

So, this is a regression. I’ve already committed a fix: we now only strip the suffix if the suffix starts with “@yahoo.”, so that “@yahoo.com”, “@yahoo.it”, etc. will be stripped but “@sbcglobal.net” won’t). That fix is present in what will be 1.2.3. While we’re at it, we know of a couple other regressions which we’ll also fix in 1.2.3.

Thanks for your patience, everyone.

News flash! Minor release of Adium with a major number of bug fixes! Grab it while supplies last!

Adium 1.2.2 is now available. It fixes a variety of bugs and crashes and is a recommended download for all Mac OS X 10.4 or later folk. Check the version history for the details.

Don’t forget to read Contributing to Adium to learn how you can submit patches and code, help hunt down bugs, and donate to support the project!

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