Pidgin

Pidgin is an open source project that provides users with a multi-protocol instant messaging client that includes a wide range of attractive of benefits. It is supported under Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems.

Supports a wide range of IM protocols

Supported IM protocols include XMPP/Jabber, IRC, ICQ, AIM, Gadu-Gadu, SILC, Google Talk, MySpaceIM, Zephyr, Bonjour, MXit, Sametime, Groupwise, MSN, SIMPLE, Yahoo!, Yahoo! Japan, and Facebook.

Features at a glance

The application features buddy pounces, certificates, custom smileys, moods, room list, file transfers, sounds, system tray integration, spell checking, custom themes, automatic reply, idle time reporting, and much more.

Standard IM functions include the ability to add buddies, add groups, add and join chats, view user information and log, sort contacts by status, recent log activity, manually, or alphabetically, as well as to view offline buddies, empty groups, idle times, buddy details and protocol icons.

Getting started with Pidgin

When opening the application for the first time, users will be asked to create a new account, which can be customized with a local alias, avatar, new email notifications, encryption, or proxy. In addition, each protocol has its own settings and features, configurable from the Advanced tab.

Third-party plugins are available for Pidgin

A plethora of official or third-party plugins are available for Pidgin, which can add support for additional protocols, status and profile updates, enhance the security and privacy of the client, as well as to support a wide range or notification systems.

In addition, the plugins can be used to tweak the graphical user interface of the application, add Now Playing functionality, support logging and history, as well as to support many other weird functionality, such as mathematical formulas or virtual terminal.

Bottom line

Summing up, Pidgin is a really great instant messenger application of the Linux platform. It comes with built-in support for some of the most used IM protocols, and can be easily extended through plugins.

What is new in this release:

• libpurple:
• Fix an out of bounds memory read in purple_markup_unescape_entity. CVE-2017-2640
• Fix use of uninitialised memory if running non-debug-enabled versions of glib
• Updated AIM dev and dist ID's to new ones that were assigned by AOL.
• TLS certificate verification now uses SHA-256 checksums.
• Fixed SASL external auth for Freenode.
• Removed the MSN protocol plugin. It has been unusable and dormant for some time. MSNP18 has been discontinued and the protocol plugin would require a large update to start working again. See: http://ismsndeadyet.com/ The third-party Pidgin SkypeWeb plugin, however, should provide enough functionality as a replacement if people still want to use MSN: https://github.com/EionRobb/skype4pidgin/tree/master/skypeweb
• Removed Mxit protocol plugin. The service was closed at the end of September 2016. See https://pidgin.im/pipermail/devel/2016-September/024078.htm
• Removed the MySpaceIM protocol plugin. The service has been defunct for a long time. (#15356)
• Remove the Yahoo! protocol plugin. Yahoo has completely reimplemented their protocol, so this version is no longer operable as of August 5th, 2016. A new protocol plugin has been written to support the new protocol. It can be found here. This also removes support for Yahoo! Japan. According to http://messenger.yahoo.co.jp/ the service ended March 26th, 2014.
• Remove the Facebook (XMPP) account option. According to https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat the XMPP Chat API service ended April 30th, 2015. A new protocol plugin has been written, using a different method, to support Facebook. It can be found at https://github.com/dequis/purple-facebook/wiki
• Fixed gnutls certificate validation errors that mainly affected google (Dequis)
• General:
• Replaced instances of d.pidgin.im with developer.pidgin.im and updated the urls to use https. (#17036)
• IRC:
• Fixed issue of messages being silently cut off at 500 characters. Large messages are now split into parts and sent one by one. (#4753)

What is new in version :

• libpurple:
• Fix an out of bounds memory read in purple_markup_unescape_entity. CVE-2017-2640
• Fix use of uninitialised memory if running non-debug-enabled versions of glib
• Updated AIM dev and dist ID's to new ones that were assigned by AOL.
• TLS certificate verification now uses SHA-256 checksums.
• Fixed SASL external auth for Freenode.
• Removed the MSN protocol plugin. It has been unusable and dormant for some time. MSNP18 has been discontinued and the protocol plugin would require a large update to start working again. See: http://ismsndeadyet.com/ The third-party Pidgin SkypeWeb plugin, however, should provide enough functionality as a replacement if people still want to use MSN: https://github.com/EionRobb/skype4pidgin/tree/master/skypeweb
• Removed Mxit protocol plugin. The service was closed at the end of September 2016. See https://pidgin.im/pipermail/devel/2016-September/024078.htm
• Removed the MySpaceIM protocol plugin. The service has been defunct for a long time. (#15356)
• Remove the Yahoo! protocol plugin. Yahoo has completely reimplemented their protocol, so this version is no longer operable as of August 5th, 2016. A new protocol plugin has been written to support the new protocol. It can be found here. This also removes support for Yahoo! Japan. According to http://messenger.yahoo.co.jp/ the service ended March 26th, 2014.
• Remove the Facebook (XMPP) account option. According to https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat the XMPP Chat API service ended April 30th, 2015. A new protocol plugin has been written, using a different method, to support Facebook. It can be found at https://github.com/dequis/purple-facebook/wiki
• Fixed gnutls certificate validation errors that mainly affected google (Dequis)
• General:
• Replaced instances of d.pidgin.im with developer.pidgin.im and updated the urls to use https. (#17036)
• IRC:
• Fixed issue of messages being silently cut off at 500 characters. Large messages are now split into parts and sent one by one. (#4753)

What is new in version 2.11.0:

• General:
• 2.10.12 was accidentally released with new additions to the API and should have been released as 2.11.0. Unfortunately, we did not catch the mistake until after 2.10.12 was released, but we're fixing it now. See ChangeLog.API for more information.
• Include the Mozilla certificate bundle. This fixes connecting to servers with certificates from Let's Encrypt. Remove all 1024-bit CAs
• libpurple:
• media: fix an issue with ximagesink displaying only a corner cut-out of a larger webcam video (Jakub Adam)
• mediamanager: update output window destruction so that it reflects recent changes in the media pipeline structure (Jakub Adam)
• Ported Instantbird's CommandUiOps to libpurple (Dequis)
• Pidgin:
• Fixed #14962
• Fixed alignment of incoming right-to-left messages in protocols that don't support rich text
• Fix a potential crash while exiting pidgin
• AIM:
• Add support for the newer kerberos-based authentication of AIM 8.x
• Windows-Specific Changes:
• Use getaddrinfo for DNS to enable IPv6 (#1075)
• Updates to dependencies: NSS 3.24 and NSPR 4.12.
• Bonjour
• Fixed building on Mac OSX (Patrick Cloke) (#16883)
• ICQ:
• Stop truncating passwords to 8 characters like old ICQ clients did. (#16692). If you actually needed this, truncate your password manually by pressing backspace a few times.
• IRC:
• Base64-decode SASL messages before passing to libsasl (#16268)
• MXit:
• Fixed a buffer overflow. Discovered by Yves Younan of Cisco Talos. (TALOS-CAN-0120)
• Fixed a remote out-of-bounds read. Discovered by Yves Younan of Cisco Talos. (TALOS-CAN-0140)
• Fixed a remote out-of-band read. Discovered by Yves Younan of Cisco Talos. (TALOS-CAN-0138, TALOS-CAN-0135)
• Fixed an invalid read. Discovered by Yves Younan of Cisco Talos (TALOS-CAN-0118)
• Fixed a remote buffer overflow vulnerability. Discovered by Yves Younan of Cisco Talos. (TALOS-CAN-0119)
• Fixed an out-of-bounds read discovered by Yves Younan of Cisco Talos. (TALOS-CAN-0123)
• Fixed a directory traversal issue. Discovered by Yves Younan of Cisco Talos (TALOS-CAN-0128)
• Fixed a remote denial of service vulnerability that could result in a null pointer dereference. Discovered by Yves Younan of Cisco Talos. (TALOS-CAN-0133)
• Fixed a remote denial of service that could result in an out-of-bounds read. Discovered by Yves Younan of Cisco Talos (TALOS-CAN-0134)
• Fixed multiple remote buffer overflows. Discovered by Yves Younan of Cisco Talos. (TALOS-CAN-0136)
• Fixed a remote NULL pointer dereference. Discovered by Yves Younan of Cisco Talos (TALOS-CAN-0137)
• Fixed a remote code execution issue discovered by Yves Younan of Cisco Talos. (TALOS-CAN-0142)
• Fixed a remote denial of service vulnerability in contact mood handling. Discovered by Yves Younan of Cisco Talos (TALOS-CAN-0141)
• Fixed a remote out-of-bounds write vulnerability. Discovered by Yves Younan of Cisco Talos. (TALOS-CAN-0139)
• Fix a remote out-of-bounds read. Discovered by Yves Younan of Cisco Talos. (TALOS-CAN-0143)

What is new in version 2.10.12:

• General:
• purple-url-handler now works with Python 3.x (Daniel van Eeden)
• Fixed an issue where transient startup statuses could be deleted (Jakub Adam) (#16762)
• Pidgin:
• The shout smile now matches the default theme (Steve Vaught)
• Windows-Specific Changes:
• Updates to dependencies:
• Cyrus SASL 2.1.26
• libxml2 2.9.2
• NSS 3.20.1 and NSPR 4.10.10
• Perl 5.20.1
• SILC 1.1.12
• Remove support for Tcl plugins
• Gadu-Gadu:
• Updated internal libgadu to version 1.12.1.
• Voice / Video:
• GStreamer 1.0 support
• Bump farstream02 requirement to 0.2.7
• Other VV related changes required for the third-party SIPE plugin (David Woodhouse, Jakub Adam, Youness Alaoui)
• AIM:
• Fix for AIM when using gateway proxies (like smarsh) (Youness Alaoui, #14917)
• Plugins:
• Don't render smileys in the History plugin's headers. (mmcc, #16747)

What is new in version 2.10.11:

• General:
• Fix handling of Self-Signed SSL/TLS Certificates when using the NSS plugin (#16412)
• Improve default cipher suites used with the NSS plugin (#16262)
• Add NSS Preferences plugin which allows the SSL/TLS Versions and cipher suites to be configured (#8061)
• Gadu-Gadu:
• Fix a bug that prevented plugin to load when compiled without GnuTLS. (mancha) (#16431)
• Fix build for platforms without AF_LOCAL definition. (#16404)
• MSN:
• Fix broken login due to server change (dx, TReKiE). (#16451, #16455)
• Fail early when buddy list is unavailable instead of wasting bandwidth endlessly re-trying.

What is new in version 2.10.10:

• General:
• Check the basic constraints extension when validating SSL/TLS certificates. This fixes a security hole that allowed a malicious man-in-the-middle to impersonate an IM server or any other https endpoint. This affected both the NSS and GnuTLS plugins. (Discovered by an anonymous person and Jacob Appelbaum of the Tor Project, with thanks to Moxie Marlinspike for first publishing about this type of vulnerability. Thanks to Kai Engert for guidance and for some of the NSS changes) (CVE-2014-3694)
• Allow and prefer TLS 1.2 and 1.1 when using the NSS plugin for SSL. (Elrond and Ashish Gupta) (#15909)
• libpurple3 compatibility:
• Encrypted account passwords are preserved until the new one is set.
• Fix loading Google Talk and Facebook XMPP accounts.
• Windows-Specific Changes:
• Don't allow overwriting arbitrary files on the file system when the user installs a smiley theme via drag-and-drop. (Discovered by Yves Younan of Cisco Talos) (CVE-2014-3697)
• Updates to dependencies
• NSS 3.17.1 and NSPR 4.10.7
• Finch:
• Fix build against Python 3. (Ed Catmur) (#15969)
• Gadu-Gadu:
• Updated internal libgadu to version 1.12.0.
• Groupwise:
• Fix potential remote crash parsing server message that indicates that a large amount of memory should be allocated. (Discovered by Yves Younan and Richard Johnson of Cisco Talos) (CVE-2014-3696)
• IRC:
• Fix a possible leak of unencrypted data when using /me command with OTR. (Thijs Alkemade) (#15750)
• MXit:
• Fix potential remote crash parsing a malformed emoticon response. (Discovered by Yves Younan and Richard Johnson of Cisco Talos) (CVE-2014-3695)
• XMPP:
• Fix potential information leak where a malicious XMPP server and possibly even a malicious remote user could create a carefully crafted XMPP message that causes libpurple to send an XMPP message containing arbitrary memory. (Discovered and fixed by Thijs Alkemade and Paul Aurich) (CVE-2014-3698)
• Fix Facebook XMPP roster quirks. (#15041, #15957)
• Yahoo:
• Fix login when using the GnuTLS library for TLS connections. (#16172)

What is new in version 2.10.9:

• XMPP:
• Fix problems logging into some servers including jabber.org and chat.facebook.com. (#15879)

What is new in version 2.10.8:

• General:
• Python build scripts and example plugins are now compatible with Python 3. (Ashish Gupta) (#15624)
• libpurple:
• Fix potential crash if libpurple gets an error attempting to read a reply from a STUN server. (Discovered by Coverity static analysis) (CVE-2013-6484)
• Fix potential crash parsing a malformed HTTP response. (Discovered by Jacob Appelbaum of the Tor Project) (CVE-2013-6479)
• Fix buffer overflow when parsing a malformed HTTP response with chunked Transfer-Encoding. (Discovered by Matt Jones, Volvent) (CVE-2013-6485)
• Better handling of HTTP proxy responses with negative Content-Lengths. (Discovered by Matt Jones, Volvent)
• Fix handling of SSL certificates without subjects when using libnss.
• Fix handling of SSL certificates with timestamps in the distant future when using libnss. (#15586)
• Impose maximum download size for all HTTP fetches.
• Pidgin:
• Fix crash displaying tooltip of long URLs. (CVE-2013-6478)
• Better handling of URLs longer than 1000 letters.
• Fix handling of multibyte UTF-8 characters in smiley themes. (#15756)
• Windows-Specific Changes:
• When clicking file:// links, show the file in Explorer rather than attempting to run the file. This reduces the chances of a user clicking on a link and mistakenly running a malicious file. (Originally discovered by James Burton, Insomnia Security. Rediscovered by Yves Younan of Sourcefire VRT.) (CVE-2013-6486)
• Fix Tcl scripts. (#15520)
• Fix crash-on-startup when ASLR is always on. (#15521)
• Updates to dependencies:
• NSS 3.15.4 and NSPR 4.10.2
• Pango 1.29.4-1daa. Patched for https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=668154
• AIM:
• Fix untrusted certificate error.
• AIM and ICQ:
• Fix a possible crash when receiving a malformed message in a Direct IM session.
• Gadu-Gadu:
• Fix buffer overflow with remote code execution potential. Only triggerable by a Gadu-Gadu server or a man-in-the-middle. (Discovered by Yves Younan and Ryan Pentney of Sourcefire VRT) (CVE-2013-6487)
• Disabled buddy list import/export from/to server (it didn't work anymore). Buddy list synchronization will be implemented in 3.0.0.
• Disabled new account registration and password change options, as it didn't work either. Account registration also caused a crash. Both functions are available using official Gadu-Gadu website.
• IRC:
• Fix bug where a malicious server or man-in-the-middle could trigger a crash by not sending enough arguments with various messages. (Discovered by Daniel Atallah) (CVE-2014-0020)
• Fix bug where initial IRC status would not be set correctly.
• Fix bug where IRC wasn't available when libpurple was compiled with Cyrus SASL support. (#15517)
• MSN:
• Fix NULL pointer dereference parsing headers in MSN. (Discovered by Fabian Yamaguchi and Christian Wressnegger of the University of Goettingen) (CVE-2013-6482)
• Fix NULL pointer dereference parsing OIM data in MSN. (Discovered by Fabian Yamaguchi and Christian Wressnegger of the University of Goettingen) (CVE-2013-6482)
• Fix NULL pointer dereference parsing SOAP data in MSN. (Discovered by Fabian Yamaguchi and Christian Wressnegger of the University of Goettingen) (CVE-2013-6482)
• Fix possible crash when sending very long messages. Not remotely-triggerable. (Discovered by Matt Jones, Volvent)
• MXit:
• Fix buffer overflow with remote code execution potential. (Discovered by Yves Younan and Pawel Janic of Sourcefire VRT) (CVE-2013-6489)
• Fix sporadic crashes that can happen after user is disconnected.
• Fix crash when attempting to add a contact via search results.
• Show error message if file transfer fails.
• Fix compiling with InstantBird.
• Fix display of some custom emoticons.
• SILC:
• Correctly set whiteboard dimensions in whiteboard sessions.
• SIMPLE:
• Fix buffer overflow with remote code execution potential. (Discovered by Yves Younan of Sourcefire VRT) (CVE-2013-6490)
• XMPP:
• Prevent spoofing of iq replies by verifying that the 'from' address matches the 'to' address of the iq request. (Discovered by Fabian Yamaguchi and Christian Wressnegger of the University of Goettingen, fixed by Thijs Alkemade) (CVE-2013-6483)
• Fix crash on some systems when receiving fake delay timestamps with extreme values. (Discovered by Jaime Breva Ribes) (CVE-2013-6477)
• Fix possible crash or other erratic behavior when selecting a very small file for your own buddy icon.
• Fix crash if the user tries to initiate a voice/video session with a resourceless JID.
• Fix login errors when the first two available auth mechanisms fail but a subsequent mechanism would otherwise work when using Cyrus SASL. (#15524)
• Fix dropping incoming stanzas on BOSH connections when we receive multiple HTTP responses at once. (Issa Gorissen) (#15684)
• Yahoo!:
• Fix possible crashes handling incoming strings that are not UTF-8. (Discovered by Thijs Alkemade and Robert Vehse) (CVE-2012-6152)
• Fix a bug reading a peer to peer message where a remote user could trigger a crash. (CVE-2013-6481)
• Plugins:
• Fix crash in contact availability plugin.
• Fix perl function Purple::Network::ip_atoi
• Add Unity integration plugin.

What is new in version 2.10.7:

• General:
• The configure script will now exit with status 1 when specifying invalid protocol plugins using the --with-static-prpls and --with-dynamic-prpls arguments. (Michael Fiedler) (#15316)
• libpurple:
• Fix a crash when receiving UPnP responses with abnormally long values. (CVE-2013-0274)
• Don't link directly to libgcrypt when building with GnuTLS support. (Bartosz Brachaczek) (#15329)
• Fix UPnP mappings on routers that return empty elements in their response. (Ferdinand Stehle) (#15373)
• Tcl plugin uses saner, race-free plugin loading.
• Fix the Tcl signals-test plugin for savedstatus-changed. (Andrew Shadura) (#15443)
• Pidgin:
• Make Pidgin more friendly to non-X11 GTK+, such as MacPorts?' +no_x11 variant.
• Gadu-Gadu:
• Fix a crash at startup with large contact list. Avatar support for buddies will be disabled until 3.0.0. (#15226, #14305)
• IRC:
• Support for SASL authentication. (Thijs Alkemade, Andy Spencer) (#13270)
• Print topic setter information at channel join. (#13317)
• MSN:
• Fix SSL certificate issue when signing into MSN for some users.
• Fix a crash when removing a user before its icon is loaded. (Mark Barfield) (#15217)
• MXit:
• Fix two bugs where a remote MXit user could possibly specify a local file path to be written to. (CVE-2013-0271)
• Fix a bug where the MXit server or a man-in-the-middle could potentially send specially crafted data that could overflow a buffer and lead to a crash or remote code execution. (CVE-2013-0272)
• Display farewell messages in a different colour to distinguish them from normal messages.
• Add support for typing notification.
• Add support for the Relationship Status profile attribute.
• Remove all reference to Hidden Number.
• Ignore new invites to join a GroupChat? if you're already joined, or still have a pending invite.
• The buddy's name was not centered vertically in the buddy-list if they did not have a status-message or mood set.
• Fix decoding of font-size changes in the markup of received messages.
• Increase the maximum file size that can be transferred to 1 MB.
• When setting an avatar image, no longer downscale it to 96x96.
• Sametime:
• Fix a crash in Sametime when a malicious server sends us an abnormally long user ID. (CVE-2013-0273)
• Yahoo:
• Fix a double-free in profile/picture loading code. (Mihai Serban) (#15053)
• Fix retrieving server-side buddy aliases. (Catalin Salgu) (#15381)
• Plugins:
• The Voice/Video? Settings plugin supports using the sndio GStreamer backends. (Brad Smith) (#14414)
• Fix a crash in the Contact Availability Detection plugin. (Mark) (#15327)
• Make the Message Notification plugin more friendly to non-X11 GTK+, such as MacPorts?' +no_x11 variant.

What is new in version 2.10.6:

• Fix a bug that requires a triple-click to open a conversation window from the buddy list. (#15199)

What is new in version 2.10.5:

• libpurple:
• Add support for GNOME3 proxy settings. (Mihai Serban) (#15054)
• Pidgin:
• Fix a crash that may occur when trying to ignore a user who is not in the current chat room. (#15139)
• MSN:
• Fix building with MSVC on Windows (broken in 2.10.4). (Florian Queze)
• MXit:
• Fix a buffer overflow vulnerability when parsing incoming messages containing inline images. Thanks to Ulf Harnhammar for reporting this! (CVE-2012-3374)

What is new in version 2.10.4:

• General:
• Support building against Farstream in addition to Farsight. (Olivier Crete) (#14936)
• IRC:
• Disable periodic WHO timer. IRC channel user lists will no longer automatically display away status, but libpurple will be much kinder to the network.
• Print unknown numerics to channel windows if we can associate them. Thanks to Marien Zwart. (#15090)
• MSN:
• Fix a possible crash when receiving messages with certain characters or character encodings. Thanks to Fabian Yamaguchi for reporting this!
• XMPP:
• Fix a possible crash when receiving a series of specially crafted file transfer requests. Thanks to Jose Valentin Gutierrez for reporting this! (CVE-2012-2214)
• Windows-Specific Changes:
• Words added to spell check dictionaries are saved across restarts of Pidgin (#11886)

What is new in version 2.10.3:

• MSN: Fix buddies not going offline. (#14997)