Besides the completely stupid new name pidgin is an absolutely awesome program. I love the fact that I can be logged into AOL, MSN, and Yahoo all at the same time.(and it only shows one buddy list with all your accounts. AWESOME)
Gaim is free, light, and no ads. It has spellchecking(must check it in installation) too!
Its the only IM program I plan to use for a long time.
i used to use gaim. i absolutely loved that program because of its spellchecking and because of the gaim-encryption plugin which allowed encrypted IMs. but, i've since moved on to Miranda IM since it's much much lighter and because i don't like having the disgusting GTK+ Runtime on my computer.
With Miranda can I be logged into all accounts at once? Gaim is using about 20mb right now which I think is pretty reasonable.
The older versions of gtk used to cause problems but I haven't noticed anything wrong in a long time. I know the gimp requires it and so do a few others.
How safe are these messenger clients? I haven't reloaded AIM, MIRQ or a torrent program since I read several years ago that they open ports and you have to carefully monitor them. I really became careful about 2 OS reinstallations ago. Just before I had a chance to disable my Windows messenger service, a spam message popped up advertising an anti-spyware program. The new OS was loaded for perhaps 5 minutes. It was also before I loaded a firewall, so that could have prevented it. You get wary of these programs when you run TCPview at the same time, and look at all those ports that are constantly opening and closing.
I wouldn't mind IM'ing old friends who still use AOL. Is there any comparable function to Google Talk in these programs? How does the Google messenger client compare to the others?
Do any of you take any additional security measures when using the above mentioned programs?
How safe are these messenger clients? I haven't reloaded AIM, MIRQ or a torrent program since I read several years ago that they open ports and you have to carefully monitor them. I really became careful about 2 OS reinstallations ago. Just before I had a chance to disable my Windows messenger service, a spam message popped up advertising an anti-spyware program. The new OS was loaded for perhaps 5 minutes. It was also before I loaded a firewall, so that could have prevented it. You get wary of these programs when you run TCPview at the same time, and look at all those ports that are constantly opening and closing.
I wouldn't mind IM'ing old friends who still use AOL. Is there any comparable function to Google Talk in these programs? How does the Google messenger client compare to the others?
Do any of you take any additional security measures when using the above mentioned programs?
I guess they are about as safe as email. Most of the AIM viruses I've seen were installed from a spam link. It would say something like, "Hey come check out my pictures here". As long as you don't click the link your fine. That being said, I've never even once encountered one of these spam messages first hand. I know they exist because I've cleaned up the aftermath.
I don't know if using alternative clients like gaim or trillian are any safer or not. Probably not.
I would think as long as your running an antivirus everything should be ok.
Miranda is okay. I don't like it's interface even though you can customize it like Adium (mac app). I been using Gaim since 2 years .. When I was at Columbia's computer lab doing my research, I found it in their linux box. Then search it on Google and found a version for Windows and started using it.