Pidgin says “Unable to add user: Unknown error (204)” on login to MSN

Question

I have Pidgin 6.5.5 for Ubuntu 9.04.

Whenever I login to my MSN account, I get this error:

"Unable to add user: Unknown error (204)" on login to MSN

Which shows up in the debug log as:

(18:22:45) blist: Updating buddy status for someuser@email.com (MSN)
(18:22:45) msn: ADL error

Where email.com is not just yahoo.com, like many misguided forum posts say.

I have tried the following:

1. Removing all references to any @yahoo.com buddies for this MSN account
2. Removing all references to any buddies that cause the ADL error. After each successive removal, another buddy causes the error.

The bug even says its fixed in version 6.5.0, but it's not.

Answer 1

It took more than a year of not bothering to figure this out, but I finally figured it out.

Do these things:

1. Log in to MSN on a Windows box. (I know, it hurt me too)
2. Find that user, and delete them, their account is probably closed anyway
3. Your Pidgin should work fine again.

I couldn't for the life of me fix this problem with Pidgin alone.