[MSN] Authentication failure with password containing special characters.

[knny.myer@…]

I was getting AuthenticationFailure every time attempting to login with my MSN password credentials.

The reason is that, my password contained a "\" character and a alphanumeric value after it.

After changing the password to something else it worked fine for me.

[wilmer]

Actually I think this was not a bug in the MSN module.

\ is a special character for BitlBee, meant to be used to escape other characters. So for example, if you have a space in your password, you can add it anyway like this:

account add msn knny.myer@hotmail.com password\ with\ spaces

If you really have backslashes in the password, you have to type them twice:

account add msn knny.myer@hotmail.com password\\with\\backslashes

I'll close this bug assuming this was indeed the problem. If I'm wrong, please do reopen.

[knny.myer@…]

Thanks, you're right.

Maybe, this should be mentioned in the man pages or in the documentation?

[Wilmer van der Gaast <wilmer@…>]

Maybe, this should be mentioned in the man pages or in the
documentation?

Agreed. I'm just not sure what would be the right place to mention it.
Since this is probably mostly going to bite people when typing in
account passwords, I guess the "account add" item would be a fairly
suitable place.