Does anyone know if there is any restriction on the number of open chats(sessions) a user can have on any of the external IM services like AOL, Yahoo, or MSN?
How about Wildfire?
Is there anywhere I can get more information on this and other types of restrictions these IM services have?
You say chat and sessions kind of interchangable so I’'ll address both.
I am not aware of a max number of chats that can be going on at the same time. Most of the services don’‘t even really track a “conversation”, just a message being sent, and a message being received. MSN is one of the few that actually pays any attention to a chat “session” and I’'ve never witnessed a limit on that. AIM, while it has no max limit on that front, it does have rate limiting, so if you are talking too fast, too many people, etc … basically any packet traffic … then AIM will instruct you to slow it down and you either comply or you start getting rejected outright.
As for sessions, most of the services don’‘t let you log in to a single account more than once. I’‘ve never witnessed a limit on actual number of -different- accounts you can log into though. In fact I’‘ve got quite a few users of PyICQt and PyAIMt that have a ton of users using it at the same time that would all be coming from the same ip address and they aren’'t rejected. (I am told thousands at the same time)
Not sure if that answered part of your question though. =)