Chat log

A chat archive is an archive of transcripts from online chat and instant messaging conversations. Many chat or IM applications allow for the client-side archiving of online chat conversations, while a subset of chat or IM clients (i.e., Google Talk and Yahoo! Messenger 11 Beta) allow for the saving of chat archives on a server for future retrieval. The latter trend has been adopted by the applications' vendors because of the decreasing cost of web server hard drive space.

Examples

Google

Google has integrated its own chat archiving feature into Gmail, which lists Google Talk and Gmail Chat conversations alongside email conversations.

Yahoo!

Yahoo first experimented with online archiving of Yahoo Messenger chat logs through its Yahoo! Messenger for the Web application, which separately saves its own chat archive when users communicate through that client. In 2010, the beta of the 11th version of the standalone Messenger client featured online archiving of chat logs, although the archive is only available and viewable from within the logged-in client.