The default state on the MXit server when connecting is Available (with no status message), but Pidgin might be configured to remember the last presence state. So after login, if the presence is not Available or if a Status message has been set then we need to send a Status update packet to the MXit servers. Pidgin also use a HTML-style encoding for the status message. In the situation above they also need to be de-HTML'ified first.