Upon signing in this morning, I was greeted with the following in the info bar at the top of the contact list:
Clicking it took me to the Windows Live Messenger Help, explaining why I received the error. The contacts server is indeed having problems; it made four different unsuccessful attempts to fetch my contacts data. I wanted to see what would happen if I deleted the messenger cache in the temporary folder ‘MessengerCache’ (%TEMP%\MessengerCache\). Signing in again, I was greeted with no contacts (since the contact server is down and I have no cache from last time):
What we can gather from this is Windows Live Messenger’s new method of storing and using contact data is completely independent from the messenger service, as we have also previously heard about the new Unified Contacts feature which keeps all your contact data in one place. This means you can have the same contacts in messenger, in your address book, on your phone, etc. and when one you change something in one place, you will see the changes everywhere else.
As I was having trouble connecting to the contacts service, I was seeing only my cache. Any changes made to my list would not be saved, because they can not be committed to the contacts service, as the info bar message says.
For those interested in the protocol, in the second scenario the ADL command looked like this as it had no contact data:
ADL 11 15 <ml l="1"></ml>
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