It is worth mentioning that, due to the fact that AOL bought ICQ, the two instant messengers are gradually merging.

Many ICQ clones are now working suboptimally (e.g. licq), if not improperly (e.g. micq), especially when talking to ICQ2000b users.

Typical symptoms are lost messages, display of old offline messages when looging on, etc.

Infact, as a tangible sign of the merger, it is now possible to login in the AIM network using your ICQ UIN and your password and interact with ICQ users.

This said, ICQ2000 and OSCAR (the AIM protocol) are not yet the same.

In order to have a fully functional ICQ client, it is necessary to implement the ICQ2000 protocol, as the old versions are not fully functional anymore. The old protocol will probably be phased out, as I don't see any improvements of the reliability of old clients these days. There are lots of differences, e.g. ICQ2000 is TCP based, previous versions (e.g. the one used in micq) were UDP based.

You can find plenty of useful and verified facts in the micq mailing list archives, starting from late October, e.g. this thread.

I know only one perl ICQ2000 client, vicq.

It's in a very development stage (and with an explicit no strict just before package main I don't think the development is going to be any easier (-;), and it uses a customised version of Net:ICQ2000, which I couldn't find on CPAN, probably because of its young age an experimental nature.

In conclusion, Net::ICQ clients might have problems now and certainly will in the future, be them correct or not, because of the big protocol changes.

Hope this helps.

-- TMTOWTDI