Just a quick note that the jabber.org admin team (thanks, Kev!) worked with the Google Talk admin team (thanks Jonas and Pascal!) to diagnose the problem. It turns out that Google had some broken DNS records, which have been fixed. Data is flowing smoothly again, but as always let us know if you experience any further problems.

If you tried to register a new account in the last ~48 hours, you probably noticed that the certificate we use expired. We’ve updated the certificate at register.jabber.org so that it uses the same certificate we use for the XMPP service. You can now register accounts securely again. :)

This morning the jabber.org admin team installed a new build of M-Link provided by Isode. This build addresses the major issues we’ve had over the last month or so.

First, communication between Google Talk and jabber.org appears to be fixed. We can’t promise that you’ll never experience any difficulties chatting with your Google Talk friends, but the previous problem (lagged and in some cases lost messages) has been solved.

Second, the old legacy SSL port 5223 is working again, enabling you to connect using most older clients (e.g., iChat on Tiger) as well as various “crippled” clients that still don’t support STARTTLS on port 5222 (e.g., mobile clients like QIP and SIM). We will continue to encourage developers of those clients to add STARTTLS support and we reserve the right to turn off port 5223 at some point in the future, but we probably won’t do so until platforms like OS X Tiger and KDE 3 have been end-of-lifed.

Several smaller issues have yet to be fixed (e.g., chatroom logs and persistent storage of changes to personal vCards and chatroom configurations), but we will be working with the Isode team on those fixes in the coming weeks. We are also aware that we still need to get web registration working again. If you really need a new jabber.org account instead of an account at one of the many other open XMPP services, please use the contact information provided on the Get Help page for assistance and we’ll try to take care of your request as soon as possible.

It turns out that the Miranda IM client for Windows does indeed support encrypted connections on the standard XMPP port 5222. As explained by Boris Krasnovskiy on their developer list, if you are a Miranda user then you need to configure your preferences under Main Menu > Options for “port 5222″ and “Use TLS” in order to connect securely to the jabber.org service.