I tried to send a message, but got an error that says “Could not send; a connection error occurred.” What does this mean?
It may mean that MSN doesn't like your message.
MSN censors messages containing particular fragments of URLs. Previously, the message would simply be dropped with no indication to either side that it went away; now, at least, you get an error message (inline in the message view).
Pieces of text that are known to cause MSN to throw a message into the memory hole
The most common ones that we know of are:
- .info
- profile.php? (including ‘?’)
- download.php? (including ‘?’)
- gallery.php
- pics.php
- ListAllTopics.php
- .scr (source)
Andrew Wellington has a much longer list.
Can you fix it?
This censorship is server-side. There's nothing we can do about it. We could encode URLs, but MSN could always plug that hole and we'd be back where we started.
Why do they do this?
The reason that Microsoft has stated is that it is because they may be URLs to exploit Windows or Microsoft Windows Live Messenger security holes.
Of course, any URL can be an exploit URL. The correct solution would be to fix the bugs that evil URLs would exploit.
