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From: Ed Anson on 26 Dec 2009 19:16
Ed Anson wrote:
> My son, daughter and I have AIM accounts to help us keep in touch. We
> all use iChat on MBPs. But now I am not able to contact my daughter. But
> here's what is weird:
>
> When I log in, my daughter shows offline, but my son shows online.
> At the same time, my son sees both of us online, and my daughter sees my
> son online but me offline.
>
> But when my son logs in using my MBP, he still sees my daughter online
> and can connect with no problem.
>
> Before I got my MBP, I was able to contact my daughter from a different
> Mac but using the same account.
>
> Can anybody make sense of this and suggest what might be going wrong?
>
> /Ed

Thanks to those who made suggestions. As it turns out, I discovered the
cause of the problem -- and it turned out to be weirder than anybody
thought.

Back when AIM was working between me and my daughter, I entered her AIM
account name into my Palm PDA so I'd have it if I needed it at a
different computer. Unfortunately, I misspelled it (one character off).
It didn't matter though, because iChat had the correct address.

More recently, I added software that syncs my PDA to the Mac's address
book. Merging the information resulted in two AIM entries for her,
including both the correct and the incorrect account name. Then, when I
fired up iChat, it synced up with Address Book, taking the bogus name
along with the correct one. Everything still looked normal, except that
my daughter appeared to be offline.

Because of the auto-sync between iChat and Address Book, I had
difficulty correcting the error once I detected it. If I corrected it in
Address Book, the bogus information got "restored" from iChat. Because
iChat had decided that the bogus name was the primary account name, it
wouldn't let me just delete that one. I finally had to delete the buddy
list entry altogether and create it anew (after updating Address Book).

After all that, I was finally able to have a belated Christmas chat with
my daughter who lives 3000 miles away.

/Ed
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