# PBM: connection errors with Yahoo and Pidgin [WORKAROUND]

## VinzC

Hi all.

Some time ago I got connection issues to my Yahoo account with Pidgin on my Gentoo machine. It failed to connect with the error message "Input/output error". I gave up and ended up living without my Yahoo account on my Gentoo machine after I tried to investigate... in vain. Now it suddenly errs again with my Jabber account, which I *do* use every day. The error message now is "SSL connection failure"!

Thing is I have the very same version of Pidgin (2.10.7) on my Linux Mint laptop and everything is absolutely, perfectly fine! Well, except the count of unread messages never ceases to increase (now it's above 700) although Yahoo reports me no unread message but that's another, meaningless annoyance I might deal later. Or not.

Well, in short, only my MSN account (which I use only casually) and my Xfire account (which I almost never use) work fine and I'm now puzzled as to what's going to fail next time  :Sad:  .

Can anybody help diagnose and fix this issue?

I've just tested Pidgin on my laptop at home and my Yahoo account connects just fine. However My jabber account times out. I'm using im.apinc.org with my Jabber account. Does it have anything to do with it? Can I safely change Jabber servers and will my account still be able to connect?

Thanks in advance.

EDIT: Running Pidgin in debug mode tells me this amongst other things:

```
gnutls: receive failed: A TLS packet of an incorrect length was received
```

This is what I've been getting with my Yahoo account from my Gentoo machine for a couple of weeks now.

There was also an update to my DSL router and I applied it. Curiously enough my Jabber account works now. But it's still a no-go with Yahoo  :Sad:  .

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## VinzC

This turned out to be due to a buggy behaviour of some sort with Yahoo IM servers and the fact that GnuTLS ensures TLS connections end with close_notify . GnuTLS enforces this rule and seems to return an error while NSS doesn't. Compiling Pidgin without gnutls does the trick but then makes Pidgin vulnerable to MitM attacks. When paid companies aren't following the standards they work for... I've really had my time with Yahoo. *sighs*

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## jagdpanther

Not using GnuTLS does 'fix' the failure to connect to Yahoo issue for me.  Unfortunately, if you also use an IM server that Requires TLS then you can't use that IM server.

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## VinzC

 *jagdpanther wrote:*   

> Not using GnuTLS does 'fix' the failure to connect to Yahoo issue for me.  Unfortunately, if you also use an IM server that Requires TLS then you can't use that IM server.

 

Yup, this is why I didn't mark this topic solved, it's not really a solution alas.

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