On: Switching from Gmail to FastMail

[jmillikin]

  > However, along these lines the removal of Jabber support
  > from Gmail is a little bit scary (first they removed
  > federation support, then they killed it altogether)

Federation support was temporarily disabled, then re-enabled once they got spam filtering in place. Currently, XMPP works perfectly with a Gmail account.

[masnick → jmillikin]

I wasn't aware of that. I actually ran into federation issues a few months ago, but maybe it has been fixed since then.

My understanding is that upgrading to Hangouts still disables the old XMPP support.

[jmillikin → masnick]

  > My understanding is that upgrading to Hangouts still
  > disables the old XMPP support.

Sort of; the web interface will connect to either Hangouts or XMPP, but not both at once. XMPP continues to work fine for non-web clients, such as Pidgin.