Change purple_url_encode() to not encode . _ - ~ because it's not necessary. Also use capital letters instead of lowercase. RFC3986 says capital letters are a SHOULD and that lowercase letters should be equivalent. AOL's clientlogin authentication requires both of these changes for our signature to match up with the signature generated on AOL's side. Original I had implemented an oscar-specific version of our url encode function with these two changes, but I'm pretty sure it's safe to make this in purple_url_encode(). It looks like it's almost always used to encode pieces of URLs. MSN uses it for a few other things... I tested setting those characters in your friendly name and it works fine.