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According to this discussion on the Cerulean Studios website, their new version of Trillian Pro already supports the MSN 6 protocol, and thus should not be affected by this change.
It's already in beta testing, and should be out before the deadline.

According to this discussion on the Cerulean Studios website, their new version of Trillian Pro already supports the MSN 6 protocol, and thus should not be affected by this change.
It's already in beta testing, and should be out before the deadline.

One word for ya...Trillian

Not Free Software, but my fave IM app nonetheless

Trillian can run from portable media (even a CD if you're not interested in changing settings). Gotta modify some ini's to make the paths relative, but it works pretty well.

Somebody even set up a website with step-by-step instructions

Trillian Anywhere

Actually removing the program does not actually block messenger. There are many clones out there that use the same protocol and servers that messenger uses (trillian, JMSN, etc).

To actually effectively remove MSN Messenger communications, work must be done at the firewall level. (I won't bother repeating the excellent solutions below)

Trillian has all of the features of AIM... without the ads. Plus, it has a plethora of nice skins. (Personally, I like the default Trillian Pro skin with the MSN icons.)

I'll bet the folks at Cerulean Studios are calling all those brokerage firms right now; Trillian does logging natively and connects to all the major networks. If you're on Windows (which I imagine a lot of these brokerages are), why use anything else?

Trillian has excellent logging facilities on a per user/contact basis for all of the major IM services, and can be obtained for free.

AIM has ~33 Million users. ICQ has ~6 million users. According to ComScore Media Metrix at least.
Go register for an ICQ account. The numbers are far beyond the 6 million mark. As far as AIMs ~33 million users? Yeah, with people still dumb enough to pay that kind of price for shoddy dial up, it makes sense there'd be so many AIM users.
Fact is, AIM is less functional. It lacks many of the features that made ICQ superior. Of course if you're smart and use Trillian, this is all moot anyhow, as you've had "cross network compatibility" long before any of the big comapnies pulled their heads out of their posteriors. ~33 million users, the largess of which are lame wanna be 5c|21p+ |1dd13z.

IMO, The fact that ICQ uses numbers to identity users is probably part of the reason that people prefer other instant messenger services. Which would you have a better time remebering: 57544362769 or mynickname? When AOL took much of Compuserve's market it was because people loved the way AOL used names for their users and not numbers, as Compuserve did. The first step in making something user friendly is making what they use, easy to remember.

When it comes to the client I really didn't care much for it, especially the one for MacOS X. When so many friends being spread across services I opted to use multi-messenger clients such as Fire on the Mac and Trillian on the PC.

eh?
Trillian has a free version, the Pro version simply adds plugin support and some other features.
Most of these aren't essential for most, I think
btw, I bought Trillian pro, and have no complaints :)

ICQ had more features (able to msg people offline) and AIM was and is relatively featureless. Maybe that's what people like. Just the basics.

In any case, I use Trillian to log on to all the different services at once. (Jabber is another option).

For those of you complaining about ICQ bloat, there's ICQ Lite (link is to the alpha version that can communicate with AIM)

Nice troll. Well not really, and it got marked up to insightful for some reason. Way to go, moderators. Now if you'll all put down the crack pipe and read the following:

Hey, guess what? You don't have to install ICQ to talk to ICQ users. You could use one of the many Jabber clients available to you, though I don't prefer them myself. Programs such as Trillian and the free, open-source GAIM allow you to simultaneously connect to various different IM networks with relative ease now, and despite not supporting the entire feature set of these networks in the case of GAIM, is certainly preferable to having a client installed per each network.

There's also the web pager and web chat room (http://wwp.icq.com/#######, where the # signs are for the number of the user you want to contact). Send them a pager message letting them know you want to talk in their web chat, and away you go.

There's -also- a Java client on the ICQ page (over here), which you can use from just about anywhere if all you want to do is get through to people on ICQ, but the above alternatives are preferable in most cases.

There's also..oh, hey. You're probably not even reading this anyway, are you troll? You got your cute little jab in, and you've probably moved off to harass some other group. Sorry to have wasted your time with reasonable discussion.

Trillian provides a unified and consolidated view of all of these IM worlds - but you can't send from ICQ to AIM or vice-versa.

btw - I donated and use Trillian Pro.

so it might as well be me.


Use Trillian , it rocks.

Jabber support for trillian is on the way, I got the info from trillian developper Rachel Blackman

"What I REALLY want is AIM to automatically log all conversations..."

Er, Trillian does this. It also supports the ICQ and IRC protocols, though its IRC support is limited. (AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo support all work great out of the box.)

You can also use Trillian's built-in 128-bit encryption (as several others have pointed out.)

To add my own specific little plug for Trillian, I like that I can have three AIM accounts signed on at one time (and pick which one I want to use to send messages to others.) This is great.

Trillian works in Windows and also in Linux with the help of WINE.

I don't know enough about encryption to comment on this...but I'll look into it, thanks. :)

Also I forgot to include a link to Trill's SecureIM page, which shows that you're right about the encryption method:
"Trillian utilizes 128-bit Blowfish encryption with a Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange to secure your conversations. Keys are negotiated per session."

Some users (like me) have fairly serious or business conversations over these chat networks. Using unsecure chat is like speaking in a room with hidden nooks and cracks in the walls leading to other rooms; anyone can sniff an unsecure chat.

I much prefer conducting my semi-private conversations in a high tower with thick walls, where strangers cannot overhear them.

Trillian is what I use right now to allow this, but it only works with Trillian users, not normal AIM users. It would be nice if AIM made their encryption scheme usable by other clients...although I agree with other posters that it may just be a plan to keep other clients off the network.

Trillian has had this feature for as long as I can remember using it.

Trillian already supports 128 bit encryption over AIM and ICQ between Trillian users.

From the Trillian forum's FAQ

That shows how to only accept IM's from users on your contact list.

or trillian!

I have studied ICQ protocol about a year and a half ago in some detail.

At the time the clients would try to estabilish a direct TCP connection amongst themselves as best they could, even for a single message, only resorting to a using the server for relay if: a) both of the clients are behind a firewall b) One of the clients disabled this feature not to reviel his/her IP address.

Of course in my expirience a) is very often the case these days.

BTW: Trillian Is an excellent ICQ/AIM/MSN/Yahoo client which supports Blowfish encryptions on any of these protocols if the other client is also using Trillian.

Have you tried Trillian? It supports both SecureIM (128-bit encrypted tunnel) and DirectConnect (IM between you and the person, not through AIM's servers). Oh, and it's free.

I take it you haven't tried Trillian then. Besides being a universal solution to the major IM formats, it supports using "Secure IM"(128bit Blowfish) encryption to other Trillian clients over AIM and ICQ seemlessly. It's an entire point-to-point encryption method, so unlike Jabber, there isn't any weak-point to grab the IM. It isn't open-source, but it is free as in beer, so it's worth giving a try.

Two new patches are now available. These will supersede all other patches for 0.74 and 1.0, so you will only need these files.

These patches include several changes to the AIM and ICQ engines within Trillian:

1. Fixes the AIM connectivity crash that started on 02/11/2003.
2. Adds ICQ2Go support.
3. Fixes the issues with AOL 8.0 and Trillian.

Update: If you downloaded 0.74 Patch C and are experiencing connection difficulties, please download the newest 0.74 Patch D below.

Now, where do I pick up encrypted AIM?

here or there.

Trillian is the the main reason I'm still using Windows. Of course, I'll always keep my partition for games, but the vast majority of my time spent on my computer is using Opera, Trillian, and Winamp. Two of three (or equivalent) are available.

Oh, and when Gnome supports xSnow, without removing the desktop, I'll be even more inclined to switch :P

Trillian does have logging capabilities, they are in the preferences. I use Gaim myself, becuase Trillian is not available for my current platform--the feature set is almost identical however. Trillian does look alot better than (GTK) Gaim though. Then again, it is closed source.

TRILLIAN

Trillian.exe Size of exe: 496 KB Size of all associated dlls: 3.33mb Memory usage (for me, at least): 3,860k Price: free Ads: None Check it out here.

AOL Contacts: 126
ICQ Contacts: 283
Y! Contacts: 38
MSN Contacts: 27
The day they all become one: Priceless.

There's some things Trillian sucks at, for everything else there's...erm, well what was there again?

That was months ago. I have been using Trillian Pro to access AIM and ICQ and there hasn't been a service outage since ... I can't remember! Definitely not within the last few months.

Trillian. You know you wanna.

I use Trillian

It does:
AOL
ICQ
Yahoo
MSN
IRC

What else could you possibly want in one integrated IM client?

Trillian.cc

It lets you connect to and message users on both ICQ and AIM, as well as MSN and Yahoo. And you can connect to IRC with it, although I prefer to use mIRC for that.

Oddly enough, I use a combination of my AIM-enabled Nokia 3390 T-Mobile phone, Trillian Pro as my AIM client, with Winamp 2.x plugins, and it's built in word-matching abilities to control Winamp. For instance //next could change to the next song, as Tril Pro supports Winamp controlling as such through it's plugin. I can also launch MS Outlook from my mobile and any other program. Or set my status to away, or lock my workstation. I doubt any of this would ultimately be useful to you, but it's fun to turn the music on and off from another city... sorta...

Trillian

Will use your current MSN screen name, account, buddy list and let you check your Hotmail. Also great as it will also let you use AOL IM, Yahoo IM, IRC, ect. all in one tidy interface.

Oh yeah, its free.

Disclaimer: I don't work for these guys.

If you're a windows user, miranda icq is very nice, tiny, and skinnable. If you're a linux user, no doubt you've heard of licq or Kit. And if you want something more than just icq, both Trillian (windows) and jabber (linux) are good alternatives to using the default icq bloated adware.

Watashi wa watashi.

It seems that specifically open source items were requested but since everyone is posting non-open source but free programs, I guess I will too.

Trillian has been great for me. They just introduced a pay version but a free version is still available. It is great.

Also Pop-Up Stopper FREE Edition is quite awesome for those who want to be communist and not support the Mozilla engine.

Here is my experience:

• Everything is plugin...so nothing but AIM/ICQ out of the box.
  
• I was dropped AT LEAST 5 TIMES in 5 minutes
  
• No copy/paste in chat windows (CTRL=C brings up "Colors")
  
• No right-clicks.
  
• No SecureIM.
  
• Can't click to follow links.
  
• COMPLETELY NON-Intuitive interface
  

I did make certain to be distinct in saying WinGAIM and not GAIM. I've not used GAIM and from what I've heard and read, it's kick-ass.

I know *for a fact* that the point in releasing their "alpha" 3 days after the Trillian release was to steal thunder. I also know that seanegan is a frequent guest in one of the Trillian channels, where he openly recruits people to try his software.

Since there is plenty of "Trillian-bashing" going on in Trillian forums, I figured I'd point out that if anyone thinks WinGAIM is a viable alternative, they'll be extremely disappointed.

And I know....it's alpha. But if you're gonna run with the big dogs, you've got to be able to piss in the tall grass.

Before now, if you didn't like Jabber for AIM, the only alternative was to use AOL's closed-source client.

Trillian has also released their "next-generation" IM client, Trillian Pro. Luckily (for me at least), those of us who have contributed at least one dollar in the past can get it for free, and those who didn't must pay $25 for it.

I use Trillian - So should you!

One of the cool things is if both people use Trillian, they can communicate using SecureIM which encrypts their conversations.

Whatever happened to the aim-t probelms? The last part of the saga I remember is that instead of making up new FLAP codes, AOL just started looking for large quantities of signon from the same IP indicating a possible Jabber server running aim-t and just blocked its entire class C (so as to prevent the server moving to a new IP in the same class C). Has that ceased, os has there been soe other workaround?

Coming from AIM as my primary chat medium, that was ahuge hurdle to adopting Jabber personally. Now, I'm using Trillian Pro 1.0, happily.

Trillian - Who cares if they work together? Trillian's still damn good, and despite threats of legal action, works with all the major IM networks (besides Jabber). It even has a quite nice IRC client.

Well another weak spot is the implementation. When I used Jabber (a year ago), the server daemon crashed all the time, and was a real pain to configure. The integration with ICQ and other chat systems was very crappy (e.g. file transfers didn't work, etc.). The clients were crappy, too.

Right now I'm using Trillian, but that won't help people w/Linux desktops. Maybe things have changed, but last I checked Jabber is one of those great concepts whose implementation doesn't do it justice. Heh, kind of like Java.