I’ve registered several domains using Google Apps. Lately I’ve been fiddling with using Jabber with those domains, and I wanted to have a program be able to interact on IM using an account like tim@example.com. Furthermore, I wanted to have everything Just Work.

The place to start was with DNS. Google has a help page about how to setup your DNS so that your Google Apps accounts can be federated with other non-Google Jabber communities. The problem is that neither xmpp4r-simple nor iChat simply work if I use tim@example.com as my JID. Then I stumbled across this post that connected the dots for me.

Here’s a screenshot of how I setup my SRV records over at eNom:

After that, my simple chat listener worked:

require 'rubygems'
require 'xmpp4r-simple'

im = Jabber::Simple.new("tim@example.com", "secret-password")
puts im.connected?
im.accept_subscriptions = true

while true
  sleep(5) unless im.received_messages?
  im.received_messages { |msg| puts msg.body if msg.type == :chat }
end

My little “bot” silently accepted new buddy requests, and printed out recent messages every 5 seconds.

UPDATE: Something’s amiss here, I think. I’ll update when I have more details. Guess not. I tried this out on another domain, and thought that things didn’t work right. But I was mistaken. Everything looks good.