Gordaen's Blog

I have used Pidgin with my main Gmail account for quite a while, but I ran into some trouble today configuring it for a GoogleTalk account from “Google Apps for your Domain.” So, here are my quick notes with screenshots to show how to set up this type of GoogleTalk account in Pidgin (screenshots are from Ubuntu / Linux, but the settings should be the same in any OS).

Protocol: XMPP
Username: the username portion of your email address (e.g., john@doe.com would use “john”)
Domain: the domain portion of your email address (e.g., john@doe.com would use “doe.com”)
Resource: I left this at the default of “Home”

The tricky part is that you then have to go to the advanced tab and change some settings.

Force old (port 5223) SSL: check
Connect port: 443
Connect server: talk.google.com

You can adjust the other settings as you see fit, but I just needed the basic chat functionality to work and these settings are what did it. Hopefully this helps someone else too.