Dear Norman I did change the connection attributes as you instructed me to do. The result of that was that the xmpppy client was able to successfully connect and send a message to the xmpp server. So far so good .
However the message is not reaching it's destination (i.e. the destination messenger). I did send a message from a messenger to a messenger and copied the log and compared it to the a message log sent through xmpppy. There are some minor differences that I can change within the xmpppy code if you think this is appropriate.