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XMPP with Google Hangouts
In the old days (before May 2013), there was no such thing as Google Hangouts. Google's chat service was called Google Talk, and it was XMPP friendly. They flushed all of that out in the name of progress, and knowledge of XMPP was almost lost.
It's not that hard. Create an XMPP account in your client and feed it the following parameters.
- Username: part before "@gmail.com"
- Domain: gmail.com
- Connect server: talk.google.com
- Port: 5222 (or 5223)
- Connection security: require encryption
Then, hail an IM buddy to test it out.
Since the adoption of Hangouts, available/away status has been completely messed up. This is because the Hangouts clients will always report as "away". (However, sometimes they will jump to Available temporarily for no explicable reason.)
Don't bother bugging Google about "fixing" this. It is a feature of Hangouts, not a bug.
The "Connect server" field is tucked away under the Advanced tab. If you do not set it (i.e. keep the default of gmail.com rather than the correct value of talk.google.com), your connection will time out.
For some reason, I had to check "Allow plain-text password authentication". (I really hope that in this case "plain-text" means "plain-text" as opposed to authentication keys.)
If you ask for help about XMPP on Google's forum, someone will politely tell you to switch to a Hangouts client (as if XMPP never existed). Don't bother asking.
Also, google has an old help page about setting up XMPP in Pidgin, but it is missing the "Connect server" instruction. No one seems to interested in fixing it, hence this article.