I’ve been extremely happy with ERC and Bitlbee.
– PeterJones 2009-01-16 02:47 UTC
Yes, I’ve used ERC and BitlBee in the past. The problem with a local Bitlbee installation is that it’s tricky to do on the platforms I deal with on a daily basis, namely OSX and Windows. I think I had an OSX installation at one point. Just a few days ago I installed Openfire on our internal network at work, so I’d need a Bitlbee installation on my Windows machine at work. 
Right now I’m using Pidgin and Adium for my instant messaging (and rcirc for IRC).
– AlexSchroeder 2009-01-16 07:12 UTC
I’d go to bitlbee/erc before going to Pidgin.
– TheGZeus 2009-01-16 09:12 UTC
Hi Alex,
Don’t know what went wrong with your setup, but I’ve been using jabber.el exclusively for some years now, and it is an amazing piece of software. Did you try to use customize ? Maybe you can ask for help on emacs.jabber.general.
– paul.r 2009-01-16 08:48 UTC
Why not use one of the public bitlbee servers ? I used it for a couple of years and it’s quite stable. All you need is a http_proxy to get through firewalls.
– AlokSingh 2009-01-16 10:49 UTC
In this particular case, the Jabber Server is in a company LAN and not accessible from the outside. Surely that makes it inaccessible from the public bitlbee servers. At least I hope it does. 
– AlexSchroeder 2009-01-16 11:05 UTC
I can’t help with Windows, but on Mac OSX it’s very easy to install bitlbee via MacPorts. I wrote some Emacs Lisp to run bitlbee from Emacs, which makes it even easier: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/bitlbee.el
Having a single solution for IRC and IM is a huge productivity enhancement.
– PeterJones 2009-01-16 22:13 UTC
Wow, this is a cool solution! I’ll try it.
– AlexSchroeder 2009-10-07 02:41 UTC
Define external redirect: TheGZeus