Can the email addresses ( or other id) of the sender and receipient be
identified and how.

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Request for Question Clarification by filian-ga on 23 Sep 2003 10:05 PDT

Hello bmcdhart-ga,

Which Instant Messenger program would you like to know about? AOL's
AIM, MSN's Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, or another one?

Thanks!

Filian-ga

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Clarification of Question by bmcdhart-ga on 23 Sep 2003 10:38 PDT

AOL, MSN, Yahoo

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Clarification of Question by bmcdhart-ga on 23 Sep 2003 10:44 PDT

Can the message be retrieved

Hello, bmcdhart-ga,

If a person uses AOL's AIM instant messenger and they're a customer of
AOL usually their email would be their username plus the extension
@aol.com. Since AIM is available to everyone and not just AOL
subscribers, this makes identifying the recipient and sender quite
difficult.

Often, a user's email address and other contact information is listed
in the "profile" section of the Instant Messenger.

For AOL, you can find this info by right-clicking on the person's name
in the Buddy Window and choosing "Get Buddy Info".

With MSN Messenger, often the person's email address IS their user
name. Just right click on their name in the Buddy Window and choose
"Send E-Mail". Their email address should be visible. To find out what
information the user is sharing, click on "View Profile". This will
open a page at MSN which features stats on the user such as age, email
address and interests. A user can decide to leave any or all of those
options blank, however.

When using Yahoo Instant Messenger, right-click the person's name and
choose "View Profile".

There is no way to easily or legally find the email address or contact
info of a person who does not choose to disclose it, but these are the
easiest places to look in each of these messengers to find out more
about your Buddies. They can do the same when you send them a message.

I hope this helped!

Sincerely, 
Filian-ga

SEARCH STRATEGY:
none -- I researched each of the IM's by looking at the programs
themselves on my computer.

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Request for Answer Clarification by bmcdhart-ga on 23 Sep 2003 14:01 PDT

can messages sent and received be recalled.

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Clarification of Answer by filian-ga on 23 Sep 2003 19:40 PDT

Hello, bmcdhart-ga, 

Using Yahoo Messenger, you can go to Login, then Preferences and click
on ARCHIVE in the left hand frame and put a check in the box "Archive
Instant Messages". This will save all incoming and outgoing messages
for your review later. You can access these by going to TOOLS then
MESSAGE ARCHIVE.

AOL's AIM does not have this feature but when you are chatting with
someone you can save your conversation or chat log by going to FILE,
then SAVE. It saves the conversation as an HTML file.

In MSN Messenger you can do the same, click SAVE after clicking on
FILE when you're chatting.

As a side note, if a buddy is offline in MSN Messenger and you double
click their name, your default email program will open and add their
email address to a new email. Handy!

Thanks again -- I hope this helps!

Filian-ga

Some messenger services like MSN messenger will let you log your im
sessions.

Any user can cut and paste out their conversation.

If either party goes through a firewall, theoretically, the entire
conversation could be logged.

If the government went to your isp, they could log the conversation.

Yes there are many ways people could view a coversation after the
occurance.

There is a third party instant messenger program out there called
trillian. this supports almost all instant messenging medians..
including AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ and IRC.. this program will log your
messages for you. I personally perfer this program over the others.
Having all medians in one spot, and being able to log onto more then
one account for each medians is great. specially when at work, you
wanna be on your work aim name, and your home aim name.. check it out

http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/products/overview_basic.php - FREE
version
http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/products/ - PAY version (its worth it)