Using Hopster & Easy Message to bypass proxy/firewall and use Yahoo & MSN Instant Messengers

Easy Message - the ultra-lite instant messenger for MSN, AOL, ICQ, and Yahoo!

There are places where Instant Messaging is barred and you cannot use MSN Messenger or Yahoo Messenger the two most popular instant messeging softwares being used in India.

There are web based versions of both - Yahoo and MSN Messenger launched recently but in the restrictive environment web access to these sites is also disallowed

The software hopster creates a http tunnel through your proxy so that you can use the Instant Messengers like Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Trillian bypassing the firewall rules, but due to some reasons Yahoo Messenger does not work under hopster.

To overcome this difficulty use a combinations of Hopster and Easy Message. In both the MSN Messenger and Easy Message 'connection' setting use your local loopback IP - 127.0.0.1 and port 1080 under teh Sock v4 proxy setting.

And there you go.... you dont need to your MSN Messenger
if you are using Easy Message. Only drawback however is no matter how many accounts you have logged in using Easy Message it just groups them as Online and Offline. So one may not be able to differentiate you are chatting with someone using which ID ?. In that case you can create groups manually and create groups mapping to your accound IDs.

Easy Message is devloped by Ryan Dewsbury and is free to use :

Easy Message is a unified instant messenger that connects to the ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, and AOL instant messaging network. The messenger is licensed to internet service providers and web communities with their brand name. Since instant message programs are typically always open on the desktop it provides the companies with excellent brand recognition.

It is also distribted as a free download under the Easy Message Express brand. It has over 20,000 daily users and is the smallest and fastest instant messenger available today.