At work I’ve been using the HTTP Method in Pidgin to connect to the MSN Messenger service because of some rules in our firewall. Since the firewall is not that stable I was disconnected all the time which was kinda annoying. A coworker gave me a tip on just setting up the MSN account in Pidgin to connect to MSN via a SOCKS proxy. Since I have a computer running Linux at home with a decent enough connection I opened up a proxy from my machine at work to my home computer just using the bind-port option of the ssh command:
ssh -v -D 1080 -C <user>@<host>
Now all connections on port 1080 on my machine at work will be forwarded to my home computer.
The -v option generates some debug messages so the connection doesn’t time out. I’m not really sure if this is needed, but it doesn’t hurt to enable it.The -C option enables (gzip) compression.
The last thing that must be done is to change the MSN account in Pidgin to use localhost:1080 as SOCKS proxy (see image below)

I can’t remember being disconnected a single time after I did this. :)