How do I make Empathy use the system proxy settings?

I want to use Empathy which is provided by default with Ubuntu 10.10. Unfortunately, it seems unable to take account of the proxy settings I applied system-wide.

On the contrary, other programs are able to connect to the Internet, like for example Pidgin. Is there any solution to make Empathy also use my proxy settings?

This is a longstanding bug in Empathy. There is currently no fix available but perhaps others can post work arounds.

As already mentioned this is a bug with empathy (or at least with some of the connection protocols used in empathy).

There is a workaround for the MSN protocol:

Empathy is able to use the same connection protocols that pidgin uses (libpurple) through telepathy-haze, which is installed by default.

For MSN to work, uninstall telepathy-butterfly:

sudo apt-get remove telepathy-butterfly

Then restart Empathy, which will now fall back to use telepathy-haze for MSN connections. You should now be able to set "use the http-method" under "Edit -> Accounts" after adding a new account for MSN.

There might be similar workarounds for other protocols. For me everything else works out of the box (at least behind the proxy at work).