To be more precise, it doesn't suck everything. It just sucks certain messages into digital nirvana, notably the ones with links in them.

At some point in the last one or two days my MSN messenger started rejecting or simply eating messages when I sent out links to my friends. Sometimes I would get timeouts, sometimes it looked like the message was sent successfully but the recipient never got it.

Of course, at first I blamed my messenger software because I'm using the generally great Miranda instead of the highly annoying and way too colorful and animated Microsoft client. But a quick test showed that the messages get lost even with the official client.

I'm assuming it's either an anti-virus feature that Microsoft enabled (just yesterday I got a message from a friend--that he never sent--saying "vote for me" and containing a link that wanted me to download some file) or just an accidental feature that Microsoft enabled (a bug in marketing speech). If it's the first one, someone really didn't think very far, and if it's the second one, then I'm just baffled.

Either way, it strengthens my opinion that ICQ is just the better network. They've had some issues as well, especially with login stability, but messages are transmitted a lot more reliably. Obviously that doesn't help me because the rest of the world uses MSN. Yet another proof that the better product doesn't always win.