At work we use an IRC channel to ask questions, post progress reports and, you know, link to funny You Tube videos. For awhile I’d been using Pidgin and flirted with Trillian for a bit but I wasn’t really happy with either of them. I wanted something that could use multiple protocols (AIM, Jabber, IRC) and have full support for them. And it would be great if there was an active community to provide plugins and documentation.

A little bit of searching around lead me to Miranda and I’ve been terribly pleased with it. Supports AIM, Gadu-Gadu, ICQ, IRC, Jabber, MSN and Yahoo messaging protocols as well as having a simple, easy to use interface and a ton of addons.

I had a little trouble getting used to it at first. For one thing, getting online less intuitive than I had expected. First you need to set up your network/login information in the options window and then select the online icon from the list of icons for your chosen network.

For setting up my connection with Gmail to use gTalk I found that the listed advice was incorrect. Instead of using ‘Manually specify connection host’ and setting it to talk.google.com all I needed to do was :

login: gmail user name

password: *********

Login Server: gmail.com

Port: 443

And, of course, use SSL.

These same settings work great with jGmail, a addon for Miranda that will also check your mail for you.