Writing an MSN bot in Perl

A while ago, bot-depot.com maintained the handy MSN.pm module. Nowadays, though, the MSN protocol has evolved, and MSN.pm development has fallen behind. Trying to run the current module resulted in the error message “No expected reply recieved” (sic, not “No expected reply received”). Fortunately, there was an updated version to be found at botwork.com (MSN₂.0.84.zip). It worked a bit better, at least:

$ perl echobot.pl 
Can't locate Digest/SHA1.pm in @INC (@INC contains: ./lib /etc/perl /usr/local/lib/perl/5.8.8 /usr/local/share/perl/5.8.8 /usr/lib/perl5 /usr/share/perl5 /usr/lib/perl/5.8 /usr/share/perl/5.8 /usr/local/lib/site_perl .) at lib/MSN/Notification.pm line 21.

Install Digest::SHA1 with CPAN, and:

$ perl echobot.pl 
MSN 2.0 (01/21/2005) Rev: 84  - Checksum: 60068-NS31944-SB22354
SERVER ERROR : Authentication Error: No response from Passport server

Searching the bot-depot forums, I found that the problem is that you need Crypt::SSLeay. Install it with CPAN, and the echobot.pl works fine, ready to be modified.

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