After spending a few minutes following the erroneous/incomplete (?) official documentation from Google for configuring Pidgin for Google Apps accounts, I started searching more widely and found this blog article (thanks neale!) that provides the correct way to configure Pidgin for Google Apps users. I find it quite strange that Google doesn’t have the correct documentation… Here is a short excerpt with small modifications from that blog article – just so that it’s here should that blog disappear…
How to configure the account
You’ll want to load the “Modify Account” screen (assuming the account is already created). That can be accessed by going to the Accounts menu, selecting the account in question, and choosing “Edit Account” from the list of options.
Once the screen is loaded, click on the Advanced tab. You’ll be presented with a number of different configuration options. The following list contains the settings I updated, along with what I set their values to. Any omitted settings can be left as-is.
- Connection security: Use old-style SSL (ATTN: the default of “require encryption” had to be changed)
- Connect port: 5223 (ATTN: the default of 5222 had to be changed)
- Connect server: talk.google.com
With those changes in place, Pidgin connected to Google Talk without error.
Note: These steps were performed on Pidgin 2.7.9-5.el6.2. If you’re using a different version of Pidgin, your mileage may vary.