With the Adium or Pidgin IM client installed and properly configured, you can communicate with others at Stanford without messages traveling outside Stanford's network.
Adium and Pidgin are multiprotocol applications which also allow you to incorporate, in one chat window, a variety of other IM services. These include Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, MSN Messenger, AIM, ICQ, and Jabber. Some of your co-workers at Stanford may have accounts on both Stanford IM and with one of these services. Remember that chats between Stanford IM and external services are not secure; see the box below for more information.
N.B. Use of Adium or Pidgin to communicate with others using IM clients such as Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, MSN Messenger, AIM, ICQ, and Jabber is not secure; these chats go outside the Stanford network. It is your responsibility to ensure that you are using Stanford's IM service when conducting Stanford business. If you are conducting Stanford business over IM, both parties in the conversation must use Stanford IM for the conversation to be secure. To avoid confusion, you might consider adding a group named Stanford IM for your Stanford contacts.
To confirm that you are chatting with someone on the Stanford Instant Messaging server, hover your pointer over their user name in the chat application window. It should display as their SUNetID@stanford.edu.
Currently, Adium for Macintosh and Pidgin for Windows are the only clients supported by University IT for the Stanford IM service. iChat, the popular instant messaging program bundled with the Macintosh OS, is not currently supported for Stanford IM. iChat does not strictly follow the instant messaging XMPP protocol and will not work with the Stanford service. We continue to look for a workaround.
