Telegram-Purple Unofficial (Beta 3)

Telegram-purple is a Libpurple plugin that adds support for the Telegram messenger.

I keep getting many questions about this plugin in my mail, so I've created a telegram group chat for telegram group chat telegram-purple related discussions or questions.

Beta 3

Bugfixes

- Fix error in incoming message handling that caused segmentation faults
- Fix failing audio and video transfers
- Improved buddy list handling (should avoid "unknown" contacts popping up)
- Many small issues (see commit history)
- Fix issues that caused audio and video downloads to not have a proper file ending
- Fix issue that caused very old unused chats to not be available

Features

- Support creation of new group chats
- Support joining chats by invite link
- Support exporting chats by invite link
- Support displaying and sending GIFs 
- Mark messages read on other devices as 'deferred' to avoid needless notifications

This version should fix the crashes that seem to occur in many of the older version. Consider this another intermediate Beta version, there will be at least another one until I will consider it a release candidate.

If you migrate from an older version, the Telegram authentication files have been moved to .purple/telegram-purple. If you want to keep your old secret chats, please copy it manually from ~/.telegram-purple, otherwise you will be prompted for a new SMS code.

Build

Below, you will find instructions on how to build the libpurple protocol plugin. If you just want to use the plugin in Adium, download precompiled packages here..

1. Clone

This repository has submodules, so you need to clone recursively.

    git clone --recursive https://github.com/majn/telegram-purple
    cd telegram-purple

2. Fetch all dependencies

Fedora

    sudo dnf install gcc openssl-devel glib2-devel libpurple-devel libwebp-devel

Debian / Ubuntu

    sudo apt-get install libssl-dev libglib2.0-dev libpurple-dev libwebp-dev

OpenSUSE

    sudo zypper install gcc glib glib-devel libpurple libpurple-devel zlib-devel openssl libopenssl-devel libwebp-devel

3. Compile and install

If libwebp is not available, you can disable sticker support by calling ./configure --disable-libweb instead.

    ./configure
    make
    sudo make install

Pulling Updates

This repository contains submodules and just a simple pull won't be enough to update all submodule files. Pull new changes with:

    git pull
    git submodule update --recursive

Usage

First Login

The username is your current phone number, including your full country prefix. For Germany, this would be '+49', resulting in a user name like '+49151123456'. Telegram will verify your phone number by sending you a code via sms. You will be prompted for this code, once that happens.

Buddy List

Like in the official Telegram apps, the displayed buddy list consists of all active conversations.

Foreign Users

Foreign users, like for example people you only know through a group chat but never had any conversation with, will not be part of your buddy list by default. You can add those users to the buddy list by clicking on "Add contact..." in the users context menu.

Using secret chats

You can use Telegram secret chats with this plugin, they will show up as a new buddy with a '!' in front of the buddy name.

One caveat of secret chats in Telegram is that they can only have one endpoint, this is a limitation of the protocol. This means that if you create a secret chat in Pidgin you will not be able to use that chat on your phone. You will be asked whether to accept each secret chat, so you can always choose to accept the chat on a different device if you want. You can set a default behavior for dealing with secret chats (Accept or Decline) in the account settings if you don't want that prompt to appear every time.

Self destructive messages will be ignored, since I don't know any way to delete them from the conversation and the history.

Confirming the key authenticity

Click on the buddy in the buddy list and click on "Show Info" to visualize the key fingerprint.

Initiate secret chats

To initiate a secret chat from Pidgin, click on a Buddy in the Buddy List and hit "Start Secret Chat"

Deleting secret chats

If you delete a secret chat from the buddy list, it will be terminated and no longer be usable.

Unicode Emojis for Pidgin

The Telegram phone applications for iOS and Android make use of standardized Unicode smileys (called Emojis). Pidgin does not display those smileys natively, but you can install a custom smiley theme like (https://github.com/stv0g/unicode-emoji) or (https://github.com/VxJasonxV/emoji-for-pidgin) and activate it under Settings > Themes > Smiley Theme.

Building the Adium Plugin

Compiling with XCode is a little bit problematic, since it requries you to compile Adium first to get the necessary framework files. My advice is to just use the prebuild bundle, but if you really want to do it, follow those steps.

1. Get the Adium source, compile it with XCode and copy the build output into telegram-adium/Frameworks/Adium. It should contain at least Adium.framework, AdiumLibpurple.framework and AIUitilies.framework

2. Open the Adium source code, go to ./Frameworks and copy libglib.framework and libpurple.framework into telegram-adium/Frameworks/Adium

3. Build the tgl submodule and delete libtgl.so from libs/ (it should only contain libtgl.a)

4. Install libwebp with homebrew, move into copy it into your project

   brew install webp cp /usr/local/Cellar/webp/0.4.3/lib/libwebp.a ./telegram-adium/Frameworks/

5. Build the XCode-Project and execute the created bundle

Discussion / Help

Telegram group chat for telegram-purple or libtgl related discussions or questions:

- https://telegram.me/joinchat/01fb53f301b67d3c7a5532908dfa9a89

Authors

Telegram-Purple was written by:

- Matthias Jentsch <mtthsjntsch@gmail.com>
- Vitaly Valtman
- Christopher Althaus <althaus.christopher@gmail.com>
- Markus Endres <endresma45241@th-nuernberg.de>

Acknowledgements

This software is based on the library Libtgl, which was written by Vitaly Valtman mail@vysheng.ru and others, see (http://github.com/vysheng/tgl)

For PNG rendering, it includes the lodepng library.

This product includes software developed by the OpenSSL Project for use in the OpenSSL Toolkit. (http://www.openssl.org/)

This product includes cryptographic software written by Eric Young (eay@cryptsoft.com)