emesene is an open-source instant messaging client designed with Microsoft's messaging service, .NET Messenger Service. It aims to replicate the functions of the official Windows Live client in a more straightforward and easier-to-use way. Currently, emesene supports networks such as MSN and Jabber through papyon and xmppy, which allows you to connect to various instant messaging services such as Windows Live Messenger, GTalk, and Facebook Chat, among others.

emesene is licensed under the GNU General Public License and was developed by Luis Mariano Guerra and collaborators. It is written in Python and GTK+.

Among the features of emesene are:

• Custom emoticons
• "Nudges" (signals)
• Emoticons customization
• File transfer
• Offline messaging
• Personal messaging with the music player
• Webcam chat support
• Retrieval of contact list from server
• Customization with themes, sounds, GUI, and chat formatting
• Plug-ins like YouTube, songs, MSN Premium, Gmail mail checker, POP3 mail checker, spell checker, and last.fm, Wikipedia, XKCD, Last Said, and Countdown, among others
• MSN Plus! support, LaTeX, emoticon themes, chat log, and multilingual GUI.
• Easy-to-use, clean user interface
• Chat in window tabs

It is worth noting that, although emesene was initially designed as an MSN client, it also offered support for Google Talk and Facebook sessions by installing python-XMPP. However, it does not have webcam support in the MSN protocol because Microsoft uses a codec that does not have an open-source variant.

It is essential to mention that MSN Messenger servers were stopped years ago, so emesene's MSN backend stopped working. Even so, emesene can still be helpful as it supports multiple backends (such as XMPP, currently implemented through SimpleXMPP).

The last version of emesene was released more than ten years ago, so it is outdated compared to the most current messaging applications.