Track messages though Windows Live Messenger

Question

I would like to track messages sent and received though Windows Live Messenger. I would then like to collate these messages into a database (not in the scope of this question).

The question is how and where should I track these messages. The simplest way it to force all clients to keep history files and read those, but it is not really the solution that I am looking for. Is there a way to track them from a server running in the same domain, I have read a little into Windows Communicator, I have also seen a lot of people chat about http://dev.live.com/messenger/ but I was hoping that someone may have addressed this problem already :)

I would like to do this using C# .NET 3.5

Answer 1

I managed to find two ways of doing this, though both are not really programmatic solutions, so may not appeal to this audience.

1. Make use of a Jabber gateway to set up forwards between your jabber client and the other IM networks. Traffic flows between your jabber enabled client and the jabber server via the jabber server. The Jabber server then translates this to the destination networks protocol and forwards the message. Likewise messages from the external IM networks are routed and translated by the Jabber server. An example of this is PSI <-> IceWarp Merak <-> MSN

2. Make use of Symantec IM Manager to intercept messages from the messaging clients on your network. You will need to either use host files or local DNS rules to convince the your local PCs that Messenger.hotmail.com is actually located at 192.168.0.59 and not at Microsoft.

Hope it helps other people that may want to do the same.

Answer 2

Just two ideas
1. First the standard MSN protocol is plain text (from what I understand) so you could intercept the messages on the firewall and then put them in the DB and do the correlation there.
2. If this is in an organisation you could use Office Communicator which is the "corporate" version of MSN and has that functionality built in already. You can then just go in via their SDK and get the correlated data.

Answer 3

Here is two idea that might work.

The first one is the easiest but can be easily avoided by the user if he doesn't want to be logged. It would be to use MSN Plus over the MSN. With MSN Plus you have an API that let you get all messages from any Chat Windows... and a lot more. Of course, if the user is not you, the user can simply uninstall Msn Plus and your program will not log any data.

The second idea is better if you have a network that you require to check all Msn Conversation. If you use WireShark you can see that conversation are not crypted (well the last time I did it) and you can check the port and protocol to simply get the data from the network.

Hope it gives you a way to what you need.

Answer 4

Check out MSNPSharp. Its a .NET msn library. Its very powerful and allows you to sign in from multiple locations. So you can sign in and listen to other conversations happening on a given account. Its very straight forward to use. Download the full source code, there's a sample application that demonstrates its use in full detail.

http://code.google.com/p/msnp-sharp/