Mail.ru Agent

Developer(s)	Mail.ru
Stable release	5.5 / 2009
Operating system	Windows, Java ME, Windows Mobile, Symbian
Type	Instant Messaging
License	Freeware
Website	Mail.Ru

Mail.Ru Agent (MRA, M-Agent) is a free instant messaging program created by Mail.ru — one of the largest Russian web portals. Besides basic IM functionality (presence, contact list, sending text messages, file transfers, message history, etc) M-Agent also provides online gaming, peer-to-peer voice calls, video calls, low-rate VoIP calls, free SMS, automatic mail checking and other useful features.

Mail.Ru Agent runs under Microsoft Windows and communicates with server using proprietary (but partially documented) protocol called MMP that works over TCP/IP. Mail.Ru Agent uses portal e-mail address as unique user ID.

In addition to the opening of the protocol, in February, 2007 Mail.Ru has released its official client for mobile phones. The first version, 1.0, contains many bugs rendering it unusable on some phones. Such bugs include backlight disabling and inability to login when there's no incoming messages awaiting on the server.

On March 1, 2007, the improved version 1.1 of the official mobile client was published. Many, but not all, bugs of the previous version are fixed in it, making it usable on phones which are unable to run the previous version correctly.

All mobile Mail.Ru Agent clients lack many features of the desktop version, such as gaming, VoIP communication and cartoon sending, but include the SMS sending feature.

On August 2, 2007, Mail.Ru released the newest version 1.3 of M-Agent which fixes most, if not all the bugs encountered in its predecessors. In addation to the J2ME version, there is also a Windows Mobile version of this mobile messenger released for the first time. VoIP calling is still in the making, but is expected in future versions.

[edit] Third-party-clients

On October 19, 2005 Mail.Ru has partially opened the Agent's messaging protocol (called MMP) and allowed anyone to create third-party clients. Several implementation of them exist, mainly designed for mobile phones. Also, some XMPP servers support gating into it. A famous implementation of MMP is the mail.ru-feature in Quiet Internet Pager.

Mail.Ru Agent's messaging protocol has a Perl implementation, offered by the Net::MRIM Perl module. PerlMRIM is a wxPerl client based upon it, offering a simple GUI. This client is distributed as a tarball intended for Linux users, and as a Mac OS X App.

Also there is python implementation, offered as XMPP to Mail.Ru-IM Transport.

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