Pidgin / MSN – ‘Unable to validate certificate

Yesterday, I was forced to do some work, at work, when Pidgin failed to connect to MSN. It has a hard day.

I use Ubuntu Maverick on my desktop, and started out using the ‘stock’ Ubuntu version. As this wasn’t working, my first thought was to upgrade to the latest Pidgin release. Before I’ve compiled it from source, but this time I just used a PPA (see here)

But still, it didn’t work.

Time to rummage some more – and I found the following bug report – so I added in my 2p, and waited. Eventually the following solution came up :

1. Within Pidgin, go to Tools -> Certificates and delete the one for omega.contacts.msn.com
2. Visit   and download the SSL certificate (e.g. if using Firefox, click on the SSL icon in the URL bar and then export it (save to file)).
3. From within pidgin’s ‘tools -> certificates’ Certificate Manager click add, and add in the SSL certificate you’ve just saved.

Now it works again.

What is vaguely curious is why Adium (which I use on my Macbook at home) didn’t have a problem – I thought they [Pidgin + Adium] were built off the same code base, and expected it to break, but it didn’t.

P.S. Remember: rename *.contracts.msn.com with omega.contracts.msn.cn when u add it to your pidgin.