Pem’s Tech Blog

I use Pidgin for IM.  It centralizes your IM clients into one program, with centralized IM logs (which are an HTML format).

It has cross-platform support (Windows, UNIX/Linux).  Unfortunately it doesn’t out-of-the-box run natively on Mac OS-X.  For Mac OS-X, Pidgin suggests to: (use Adium instead) or (install Pidgin with the Fink installer) or (compile Pidgin and its dependencies yourself, since Pidgin is open source).

I am able to use Pidgin on multiple computers, with shared-and-backed-up logs-and-preferences using service like (DropBox, Live Mesh, Syncplicity).  This is easy because you just have to set the environment variable PURPLEHOME to a directory that gets sync’ed.

It use it for: AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Google Talk (XMPP).  And it allegedly supports…  MySpaceIM (no facebook yet?).  ICQ, IRC, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, GroupWise, QQ, SILC, SIMPLE, Sametime.

Servers for Yahoo and MSN, only lets you be signed in from one location at a time.  AIM lets you sign into one account from multiple places at once, although it does send you a nag message (Your screen name (evilpem) has signed in from another location. This screen name is currently signed in at 2 locations. To sign off the other location(s), reply to this message with the number 1. Click here for more information).  I haven’t tested this yet for Gmail; it let me sign on with two different computers but it gave me an error when I tried to send myself a message.

Pidgin lets you set custom smileys, so it is possible to use the “correct” smileys, such as the standard Yahoo IM smileys.  You have to import these as non-standard add-ons (Tools –> Preferences –> Smiley Themes).  This requires some effort and maintenance, because stuff can change with new versions of the IM host servers (Yahoo, etc).

Pidgin is an open-source project, so if you were really into it, you could compile and modify the source to do anything, or contribute to the project.  Or write a plugin, or just use a plugin someone else wrote (Tools –> Plugins).

But one of my favorite features, that I actually use, is the Buddy Pounce.  For example, I can set it to call an external script when a particular person IM’s me.  Calling an external script means it can do anything.  For example, I use it to send me an email when I get an IM from a particular person, with the most recent HTML message log attached, then I get the email on my smart phone.

There are some little things too, like you can customize it more with plugins (I haven’t used much yet), and you can have a really long list of saved status, and I can group buddies from different IM services into a single group.  Though be careful, not all of the little things are good.

This past week, Pidgin stopped working for me with Yahoo, and I didn’t know what was going on.  I was able to sign into Yahoo from standard-Yahoo-Messenger and from Meebo, but not from Pidgin.  Apparently the problem turned out to be that Yahoo Messenger had shut down its old version 6-to-7.5 IM servers.  So the fix was (accounts -> manage accounts -> Yahoo -> Pager Server, and replaced scs.msg.yahoo.com with 66.163.181.170), and it worked.  I found the fix here searching google news for “yahoo pidgin” and got a 5-hour old post here (http://stuff.techwhack.com/6804-yahoo-messenger-pidgin) which had the answer.  (Edit: 2009/06/25: new version of Pidgin (2.5.7) fixed this, after I changed it back to scs.msg.yahoo.com)

One thing I will admit is that Pidgin takes more effort than (just using the standard IM client) or (using Meebo).  However, for me, the extra power-flexibility-clean-logs-preferences is worth the effort (and sometimes loss of other features), at least thus far.

Sometimes it is behind on a feature.  Like standard Yahoo Messenger has had video and voice chat, but Pidgin is only just adding this.

Digsby also supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, but I don’t really use these.  And I like Pidgin, partly because of the chat logs and the buddy pounce.

A competing IM choice, is meebo.  Meebo also uses libpurple.  Meebo also centralizes your IM logs and lets you chat from one central program.  It’s even more portable and cross-platform since it runs in a web browser.  And I guess it simplifies the message logs by making them online, but why would I care since I’d rather use DropBox/etc, and so far you can’t even download the IM logs from Meebo.  So far, Meebo has an iPhone and Android app.  I am watching meebo, and I think it has potential, but I’m still using Pidgin instead of meebo.

IM clients on smart phones (mobile devices) is sort of a different topic…

Pem (Admin) :: 2009/06/19 (Friday, June 19, 2009) :: Communication: email, IM, social network, etc :: No Comments »

For a Gmail web email account (this didn’t work for my Yahoo or Outlook Exchange test emails), you can receive emails via email address alias strings to better organize your emails.

Consider “someone.blog@gmail.com“:
* put the “.” or “+” characters anywhere in the name, such as “s.o.m.e.oneblog@gmail.com” etc
* use “+” to put a string after the “someoneblog” part such as: “some+one.blog+HelloWorld@gmail.com” etc
* use either “@gmail.com” or “@googlemail.com“, such as “someone.blog+wordpress@googlemail.com”

Use these variations to organize where an automated email came from. For ex, if you register an account at www.websiteA.com, then register the email “someone.blog+websiteA@googlemail.com“. Use rules to auto-organize your emails (or search them, or filter junk email) based on the “To:” address instead of (or in addition to) the “From:” address. This may also help you know where any unwanted spam comes from.

Some websites might not let you register with the “+” in your email. You can still broadly categorize even those emails as (“@gmail” as your website registration email) vs. (“@googlemail” as your email for personal contacts), but make sure you trust the website because spammers can easily email you at both @gmail and @googlemail.

The spammers could generically auto-remove “+” and “.” and anything after the last “+”, but you could counter that by blocking (filtering) all emails that don’t have a “+”. Then give your email out with “+”’s, and have your filters count any emails you get without a “+” in the “To:” field as spam. So you would only count an email as a personal email if they sent it to, for ex, “someone.blog+personal@gmail.com”.

Using a string like “+personal” (or “+fj1830f30kfdasjfioa”) is like requiring a password for someone to send you an email. Even if the spammer knows “someone.blog@gmail.com”, there are too many possible strings for them to spam every variation of “someone.blog+[variation strings]@gmail.com”.

You should also have at least 2 different email accounts (one for personal contacts and one for registering accounts), and probably more than 2. You could easily have at least 4 emails (1 personal, 1 work, 2 to register accounts – one for companies you trust like a bank or credit card or auto-insurance and the other for any less important websites that might spam you).

For anyone with at least one Gmail email account, aliases with “.” and “+” and “@googlemail” give you additional options to better organize and filter your emails.

Pem (Admin) :: 2008/04/04 (Friday, April 4, 2008) :: Communication: email, IM, social network, etc :: No Comments »