Fixing iChat Google Talk login failures

I was helping a friend set up her new iBook MacBook yesterday, and we were unable to get iChat to log in to her Google Talk account.

We kept seeing this error:

iChat can’t log in to talk.google.com because your login ID or password is incorrect.

And this XMPP error was logged to Console:

iChatAgent[33567] [Warning] JConnection: Error: Error Domain=XMPPErrorDomain Code=10 “The operation couldn’t be completed. (XMPPErrorDomain error 10.)”

When we tried the same username and password on gmail.com in Safari, it worked. It also worked logging in to Google Talk using Adium.

So what’s going on? Well, my Google Account is [email protected]. Most people know Google also accepts emails sent to [email protected]. What I didn’t know is that you can also use paul.schreiber as a username. Most of the time.

Let me explain with a chart:

username	gmail.com	iChat	Adium
paulschreiber	YES	YES	YES
paul.schreiber	YES	NO	YES

The problem was the dot. Once we removed it, we could log in successfully.

I assume the same thing happens if your actual username has a dot and you remove it.

Filed with Apple as Radar 8978731.