Sometime in the last few months, Google rolled out an update to Google Talk that gave the option of logging my chats to Gmail, rather than my local hard disk. I installed the update, but said “no thank you” to the Google-side logging. Today I realize that means I don’t have a local chat log anymore either.
I don’t like it, they took away a feature, and they only way I can get it back is give up more of my privacy.
Check out pidgin. You can set up Google talk using the XMPP protocol, and logging is automatically local.
Thanks for the Tip! I haven’t looked at it since the name change.