"But why?"

Why not? MSN Messenger was once the ultimate king of instant messaging and social networking programs, in a time before Facebook, Skype, Discord, or Twitter. But then Microsoft bought Skype in 2012 and thought that owning two separate chat services was redundant, so MSN was shut down. Which is a shame, 'cause even though it might not have the latest features, it still is a good IM platform. Now several people are working on reverse engineering a server for every major MSN version, and you can chat with people all over the world right now!

"But how?"

Escargot is a custom-written server built to recreate the older MSN Messenger server architecture, used back when Microsoft still had the servers running. The code to recreate the servers works for versions of MSN up to 8.5, but (as of writing) support for WLM 2009 is not out yet but is close to being wrapped up and released to the public, and 2011/2012 support hasn't been started on yet, although we anticipate that will be a beast to support. However, all of the code for the server and other services and components that power Escargot is fully open source on GitLab, so feel free to contribute!