Dropped messages/broadcast to Yahoo through IM gateway

Hopefully someone out there has some suggestions. We connect our proprietary system for IM through openfire using the IM gateway to contacts on Yahoo. Our system allows for broadcast capability, i.e the ability to send a message to a group of selected contacts. We have been having trouble with it on yahoo, when we attempt this it is very slow and messages are dropped i.e never get to their destination.

Using the latest Spark tool logged into our openfire environment, and logged in as a yahoo client on there, when I do broadcast I saw better performance then I did with our own server- to -openfire implementation. We may have the answer on this, we noticed on the Spark debug that it uses type normal,not chat, when sending in broadcast mode, and I believe our server is using type chat.

However, even using the Spark client I see messages being dropped. Sending a simple message to 30 Yahoo buddies signed onto trillian (actually split between two trillian sessions on two different pc’s, to rule out load issue on trillian) using Spark logged in as a yahoo user and talking via Openfire and the IM gateway our own system uses, I routinely see dropped messages. What I noticed from the debug is that it is the last messages sent that show this behavior, which to me indicates that at that point saturation is happening and the messages are getting dropped someplace. I did several runs, same result.

I thought it might be yahoo (wouldn’t surprise me) but using a native Yahoo client in sending to a group it didn’t have this problem.

Anyone have any thoughts? We are currently running Openfire 3.4.4 and the IM gateway version 1.2.2.a.

More on this…I think I have figured out what is going on. It looks like Yahoo (whose latest client has a 'broadcast to group" feature, where you can broadcast to all members in a particularl group on the client) has implemented some sort of broadcast capability. When I do a blast to about 28 buddies, loking at the tcp dump I see the message going out in three seperate packets, where the packet has the destination yahoo id, a series of the buddies it is sending to, and the message.

Looking on the net at descriptions of the yahoo protocoal YMSG, there is no mention of this, so it must be new. Anyone have any knowledge of this, or whether IM gateway will support this?