Update 1-21-2021: Looking over old posts I see this project was abandoned 2012. But a new “clone” has come up I have yet to test. But for those interested it is Miranda-NG

Miranda Instant Messenger

If you use Yahoo IM or AOL IM or MSN IM or ICQ or Jabber or just want in house network IM this is one handy Open Source (No Charge!) Internet Messaging client.

I have a few people on each service that I like to stay in touch with but its memory (resource) intensive to run all the brand name clients so I was looking for some way to have them all in one.

Actually I have been using Trillian for this purpose for several years and it has a free version which works well but you really need to buy their Pro version to get full use of it. It is very good, but my $ is going to medicine and food these days, so a little more searching led me to Miranda.

Miranda has loads of Plugins that will not only let it interact with other IM servers but has added features for RSS feeds, Weather feeds, Stock feeds and more. It’s not as easy as perhaps the Yahoo IM itself to set all this up, but its not unreasonable either.

This is now one of my standards for OS Setups.