StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Live Messenger, AIM and YIM all are irritating due to their excess "fat". I am only interested in text messages. Is there a simple program that does just that ? I am primarily interested in a lightweight MSN client, AIM / YIM connectivity in same program is welcome but if not possible feel free to recommend similar no nonsense programs for these as well.

Miranda is the lightest-weight IM client, Pidgin and Trillian are more full-featured.

Pidgin is pretty light. If you're running OSX or some flavour of Unix, they tmsnc

I'd go with Pidgin. It's OSS, has a good feature set, and works with pretty much any IM protocol. Trillian is okay, but it definitely isn't as light weight. The free version is also fairly restricted in what it can and can't do, and there are some features that you'll probably want that are only in the paid version.

I use Pidgin all the time, on Windows, Linux, and from my thumb drive on Windows.

I concurr with the reccommendations for Pidgin. I tried Miranda once and was less than impressed, to put it mildly. Pidgin is an attractive, well developed application that is generally stable.

As I see it, the primary reason for using it rathe than AIM, MSN or YIM is the lack of obnoxious advertising built into the program. It provides a UI very similiar to that of AIM, but without the stupid video adds that distract you ever few moments. If you're on KDE, Kopete is also somewhat good (although I prefer Pidgin for its simpler, more refined UI). Pidgin is arguably the most successful piece of software to come out of the GNOME project, in that people are using Pidgin on a range of different platforms, who have never heard of GNOME in many cases (although to be fair, as far as I can tell, Pidgin does not lie exactly under the core "umbrella" of GNOME in terms of how its managed as a project).

Pidgin is nice, I've had only a couple minor problems with it, but they've been replicated on other clients, so I'm just blaming AOL itself.

Don't forget web apps like meebo. They're pretty good these days.