Trouble getting past college's firewall to use Kopete

[herting]

I've done searches on numerous forums now, and would typically avoid putting a Kopete related question here, but the KDE forums are so backwards that I thought I will attempt an answer here before I try there.

Trying to use MSN within Kopete, but I am behind an obtrusive, godawful, poorly managed college firewall which allows only a handul of ports to be open at all. This means that all my IMing occurs through port 80. Having only switched to linux recently I can say that using the http method of connecting on a windows pc works fine, but even after changing the settings in Kopete I am still unable to connect with linux.

I switched the port to 80, leaving the same connection server in the account settings, but got no where.

The closest thing to advice I have found in my searches thus far is one site suggested that the connection server for port 80 should be changed to 'gateway.messenger.hotmail.com' though after trying that I timed out just as I did before.

If anyone has a quick solution for me I would be tremendously thankful, my pc has been down for the past 3 days as I formatted to install Gentoo and banged my head against every linux forum in links trying to resolve every problem I encountered along the way. I'd like to be able to say happy thanksgiving to my mum who is in the states.

Thanks in advance, I'm certain that you will likely see a few more posts from me soon as I am still quite new and only have a limping system right now and will need some more guidance inevitably from some of you journeymen.

Keith