Check in code that connects to oscar using clientLogin. This is the authentication scheme they've publically documented. We still use the old MD5-style login as the default, but you can optionally try this out by checking a check box on the advanced tab of your oscar account. Functionally everything is supposed to be the same. However, for some reason users with Mobile IM forwarding turned on don't show up online and can't be messaged. Not sure why. Using clientLogin DOES make it easier for AOL to track us. And yes, it probably makes it easier for AOL to block us, too. But I don't believe they want to do that. I believe they're trying to keep their network open, and I think we should appreciate that and try to work with them. We're not just some small open source project that slips under the radar unnoticed anymore. It's good to have options, right? None of this code was taken from anywhere (outside of libpurple). I wrote it all from scratch (and took a few bits from other places in libpurple). I did use the documentation on http://dev.aol.com/aim , but I don't believe that affects us from a licensing standpoint in any way. If you disagree we should talk about it on the devel mailing list.