Is your friend invisible on Yahoo!

August 10th, 2004 by sameer | Posted in Technical, Tutorials, Tips & Tricks |

Yahoo! Messenger allows you to sign in under invisible mode. That makes you appear offline to everyone on your contact list. But using the information here, you can actually determine if a person is really offline or just invisible.


Upto Yahoo Messenger 5.x, all chat messages & voice conversations used to pass through the yahoo servers which would serve as a proxy, helping you hide your actual IP address.

But Yahoo! Messenger 6 creates a direct connection between the chatting parties. That way, you can determine the IP address of any person in your contact list just by sending him/her a chat message. As soon as you send someone a chat message, your Yahoo! Messenger opens a TCP connection to your friend and at the same time, your friend opens a TCP connection to you on your port 5101 (talarian-tcp). So you just need to find out who is connected to you on port 5101 to find out your friends IP address.

Steps:

  1. Connect to the Internet
  2. Sign into Yahoo! Messenger
  3. Send a chat message to any online friend on your Yahoo! contact list
  4. Open your command prompt. (type “cmd” or “command” in the ‘Run’ box from ‘Start->Run’
  5. Type netstat
  6. In the column Local address, look for port 5101.
    e.g.
    TCP HOME:2729 testsever.sameerhalai.com:47572 TIME_WAIT
    TCP HOME:2730 testsever.sameerhalai.com:52239 TIME_WAIT
    TCP HOME:2732 testsever.sameerhalai.com:2899 TIME_WAIT
    TCP HOME:2733 testsever.sameerhalai.com:30837 ESTABLISHED
    TCP HOME:5101 203.115.xx.xxx:4990 ESTABLISHED

  7. The IP address in the ‘Remote Address’ column is your Friends IP Address

Go on to the next page to know how to use this information to know if a friend is actually offline.

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  1. 9 Responses to “Is your friend invisible on Yahoo!”

  2. By Manisha on Aug 11, 2004

    That was really Neat! Deserves a pat on the back !:)Keep up the gud work(Y)

  3. By Anonymous on Aug 12, 2004

    now, it will be difficult for u to hide in invisible mode ;)

  4. By Neha on Aug 12, 2004

    now, it will be difficult for u to hide in invisible mode ;)

  5. By arun on Nov 27, 2005

    hi, i cant find 5101 port, though he is online, but invisible. i use new yahoo 7 beta. can u tell any changes in the port number?? i think its 4509 and 4510. please check and reply

  6. By sameer on Feb 1, 2006

    Should have updated you, Yahoo fixed this gaping privacy hole in version 6 itself.

  7. By angshu on Sep 11, 2006

    is the port number still same for y messenger 8.0
    anyways the job done is gr8…

  8. By alireza on May 22, 2008

    you can find yahoo status (online , oflline , invisible)
    in this site Yahoo invisible detector

  9. By stine2469 on Jul 25, 2008

    it appears they fixed it, the detector above doesnt work.

  10. By Aydin on Aug 16, 2008

    Find your invisible friends in yahoo! messenger with http://www.4invisible.com/

    http://www.4invisible.com/ has been sent %100 true response! check it ;)

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