I do a lot of business over instant messaging. Often, these chat sessions have important information that I need later. I used to copy out any important info into a separate file, but now many of the chat clients let you log your instant messaging. Some operating systems make it easy to search through your chat sessions to find a bit of information when you need it.
If you use iChat, here is the configuration window where you can save the chats (it is at the bottom of the image). Notice you can also open the folder directly from this window.
If you use the web version of Google’s chat product that is integrated with Gmail, you can set it to record your chats and make them available when you search your email. The box to change this is under the chat tab in the settings:
Sometimes this ability can become useful, but other times it can be very dangerous: someone stole my conversation files, and now he/or she has read all of them. I can only imagine what use will be done of them!
I agree with this, but i should mention another issue with this.
Okay, let’s assume that we trust Google and believe that they won’t read/sell our conversations.
But there is possibility that Google (or any other company that stores logs) could be hacked and our personal information could fall into the hands of third parties.
Chat and email aren’t good for every conversation. If you are discussing stuff that could be seriously detrimental if revealed, you shouldn’t be doing it over email or chat. Even outside of hackers, subpoenas can get access to quite a bit of stuff. You should assume pretty much everything you do online is permanent.
Google has a way to take a conversation “Off the record” so it isn’t logged. I’m not sure how well this works and how it interacts with other chat clients made by other companies. Really though, if you are concerned about this for a particular conversation, you shouldn’t be using chat to discuss that subject.
This is a great tip. I didn’t realize the text was searchable from Gmail. Thanks.